


borrow your heart, and leave you mine

by rappaccini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate/Abbreviated Version Of Season 1, Amicable Breakup, Canon-Divergence: Pre-Season 1, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Child Abuse, Pining, Pseudo-Incest, Trauma, an unholy amount of angst, fiveya and alluther endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25030630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: In most universes, Vanya Hargreeves leaves home at seventeen.In this universe, she returns a few months later.(She comes home to Luther. It changes a lot of things. But not everything.)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Luther Hargreeves/Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family
Comments: 71
Kudos: 252





	1. Chapter 1

In almost all quantified universes, Vanya Hargreeves leaves home at seventeen. 

She leaves, cresting on that wave of resentment that had at last broken loose after the death of their brother shattered the last of their father’s illusions. 

She leaves, not in the night, without a word, with nothing but a knife harness to her name, the way Diego does. Not in the day, with a mountain of suitcases rolling after her and a shimmering career ahead of her in Hollywood, the way Allison does. Not in the dusk, with a bag overflowing with unwashed miscellaneous articles of black-dyed clothing, and an uncertain foxlike gait, the way Klaus does. 

She leaves. Quietly, with a bag full of dress shirts and a class schedule for her final semester at the city’s most illustrious boarding school for girls worn to a tatter between her quivering, sweaty fingers. 

She finishes her semester in a somnambulant stupor, unable to imagine what happens to her after she graduates, after she makes that first uncertain step into adulthood. She has been accepted into the city college’s music program, has the brochure folded neatly beside her bed, beside that ancient grotesque portrait of Five that she’d taken with her when Dad had first shipped her off at fourteen. She doesn’t think about the future; she doesn’t think at all.

She spends the summer of seventeen the way she always did, sleeping on a stiff mattress in a community college dormitory room, the oldest of the children to be participating in the summer music program, the first to arrive and the last to leave. She plays woodenly, unable to find the passion all her instructors keep crowing about. Whatever well of emotion they insist on the students tapping into, she fears she does not have. She simply sighs, swallows her worries with another pill, and heads back down to the practice rooms in the basement to keep hacking at Saint-Saens. 

Vanya doesn’t let herself get too comfortable; she knows better, after years of this, not to unpack too much. Soon enough the months have melted away, and she is already packing for her freshman dormitory. She’s been approved for an extended stay, and will be there half a month in advance of her class. 

In most universes, Vanya handles it as she usually does, by sitting nervously in her room, pacing the ten feet of tiled floor like a caged lion, peering out the peephole to scan for anyone at all. She is always overcome with excitement, feeling as though she’s _arrived_ ; she’s in a new place that is not like the house in which she was raised, or the stuffy boarding schools she’d spent her adolescence shunted back and forth between. She’s a young adult, she’s going to make friends and join clubs and network and emerge from the chrysalis of anxiety-tinged numbness into the person she’d always known she’d be.

In most universes, after about a day of wandering aimlessly around an empty campus, Vanya feels that giddiness knock out of her all at once. She is a small boat, suddenly unleashed to a dock, and a wave of freedom has crashed down on her, sucking her out into the dark, where she’s spinning, spinning, spinning, unmoored and alone. 

In most universes, Vanya spends the remainder of her purgatory before the semester begins in a depressive rut, too anxious to search for the dining hall, too tired to stake out the walk to her classes, too tongue-tied to dare speak to her roommate, a stern upperclasswoman who seems quite disappointed with the strange, pale girl she’s been assigned to share a ten-by-ten cinderblock cell with. She sleeps most of the day, hides in the common bathroom when her roommate moves in, spends hours crying quietly in front of her desk chair.

In most universes, Vanya gathers herself in time. She pops a pill, feels all the fear suck out of her at once like a vacuum, and focuses only on her music, on her schedule, on graduating on time with a decent grade point average, because ordinary people aren’t very smart, and have to try very hard to get decent marks. She is invited to no college parties, she makes no friends, and she graduates on time, ranked squarely in the middle of her class, with a major in music performance, and a minor in literature. 

In this universe, Vanya does not recover. The first day of classes comes and goes, and the first week of classes comes and goes, and she stays in bed, staring at the cheap flaking yellow paint of her dormitory wall, wide-eyed and trying very hard not to cry too loudly. She sleeps all day, wakes for a few scattered hours at night, when she sits in the bathroom and sobs, and she eats rarely, and only from the vending machines. She runs out of her pills, and is too nervous to brave the six-block walk to the pharmacy to get a refill; she has never left the campus before, has never walked in the city unattended before, has never ordered anything for herself before. It had simply felt too daunting a task to attempt.

She tries to go out, and that’s what does it: the sun stabs at her with rays bright and sharp as razors, and the roar of more people than she’s ever seen in one place in her life makes her eardrums tremble, and the jostling of limbs and the heat of August press in on her and squeeze the air from her lungs.

Vanya doesn’t exactly remember what happens next. Everything kind of whites out after that.

What she’s told by the nurse peering over her critically, is that according to the dozens of witnesses, she’d grabbed two fistfuls of hair, started screaming, and dropped onto the grass, where she lay surrounded by a crowd seven students thick, watching her twitch, sobbing, in the fetal position.

Her father is called.

And that is that.

There is no clear consensus as to why this series of events came about; sometimes, things just shake loose and spiral, time is so _messy_ after all. It does not matter why it happens, only that it does, and because it does, so occurs the rest of this story. 

There is a clear consensus as to the events that follow Vanya Hargreeves’ unfortunate withdrawal from university. The metaphorical dominoes that clinked one into the next, culminating in her entanglement with Luther Hargreeves, had been set in motion by that inability to cope with the world.

In most universes, Vanya Hargreeves leaves home at seventeen.

In this universe, she returns a few months later.

She comes home in disgrace, with eyes sticky from crying, with her tail quivering between her legs. She had just a small taste of the world, and it did not agree with her, so she spat it out in a blind panic, and here she is, back where she’d started.

No one is there to greet her when Pogo escorts her home. All her siblings, save Luther, are dead or missing or gone, and he is off on a mission.

She is left in the foyer, white-knuckling her suitcase, staring uncertainly around as though there’s somewhere she needs to sign in.

After a few minutes, she dares to venture back up to the children’s hallway, where she peers bitterly into the room-that-had-once-been-her-own. When she’d been fifteen, on one of her layovers between her then-new pattern of boarding school and summer camp, she’d returned home to discover that Klaus had shattered the wall dividing their rooms and consumed hers, like a malignancy. Everything that she had not had the foresight to take with her to school was gone. Her bed, her brass-framed paintings, her music stand, her poster of Rudolf Koelman, all of it was gone. According to Ben, it had been taken out to the Dumpster the weekend after she’d first left. 

It is still no longer hers. Vanya feels remarkably stupid for peering in, as though some magic would have reconstructed that tiny space in the house that had been hers, as though any space of any size in the house could ever be hers without one of the jackals she’d been cursed to share a litter with taking interest, and immediately tearing into it as soon as she’d turned her eyes away. She is a stupid girl; she had been raised in a pack, she knows better than to assume that any territory is to be considered sacred, least of all hers. 

It still hurts. She still feels that pang of betrayal, the day she’d first peered in and realized, truly _realized_ what Klaus had done.

It still squeezes her heart, and she still chokes a bit.

She hasn’t put her suitcase or her violin case down yet; her arms are going numb.

Vanya ventures up to Five’s room, leaning in the doorway and peering in sadly.

His, too, is unchanged. She pads uncertainly in, sets down her suitcase and her violin case with a final-sounding _clack,_ one that cries out, _I am home, I am home,_ and holds his pillow in her hands, bringing it up slowly to her face to smell. 

Needless to say, it smells like nothing in particular. It’s been five years; the scent of her confidante is long gone. She likes to imagine that it isn’t. She likes to imagine that she’d be bold enough to sleep in his bed for a while, to move right on in and take up a space that, while it may not _be_ hers, it _might have_ been, had things unfolded just a little bit differently. It’s far more welcoming than the dozens of guest rooms, most of which are unfurnished and coated in dust. 

In the end, she cowers away from it. She likes to imagine a lot of things, and none came to pass. She is ordinary, and good things do not happen to ordinary people; _miracles_ do not happen to ordinary people. This is Five’s room, not hers, and it would be a transgression on her part to dare slip into his bed without his approval. He is not here to do that; therefore, she is not allowed.

And he is not dead. At least, not in the way that Ben is. There is no body, therefore there is still a chance, if slim and growing slimmer, that he might return. Therefore, she is not allowed.

She turns to leave, and nearly leaps out of her skin.

Luther has returned from his mission, and is standing uncertainly in the doorway, his gloves in his hands. There is a freshly bandaged gash on his forehead, and he looks sweaty, but his uniform is buttoned and collared securely. He’s staring at her like she’s a ghost whose floated down from the green-painted eaves of Five’s room, blinking quickly with his mouth open just a bit. 

_No one has told him,_ she realizes, _that I have come back._

Vanya digs her toe into the bare boards of the floor, and she quickly drops her gaze.

She never quite knows what to do with Luther; in the years she’d spent at the house, he’d always been distant from her, if polite. Unlike Diego or Allison, he’d rarely been outright _mean_ to her, unlike Ben, he’d never been outright _nice._ But unlike Klaus, he would make eye contact with her, and acknowledge her, if only with a quick little nod. 

And unlike Five… well. No one had been quite like him. 

Luther clears his throat several times. Then dips his head at her nervously, and trods away. 

At least that is the same.

Vanya stays in place, watching him slip out of the doorway, listening to his feet tap on the stairs, then patter away down a path she knows from having once been acquainted with the house. He is going to the bathroom, to clean off after his mission.

Soon enough comes the soft rush of the shower, and her hunch is confirmed.

Vanya lingers for a while longer in Five’s room, staring at everything as though by virtue of having her gaze fixed upon it, some sort of grand energy will be released in the universe that will guide Five back.

Finally, she sighs, and heads downstairs, to the bedroom at the base of the stairs.

Ben’s dead and gone on to whatever’s next. He won’t object to her taking up his room. So she drops her suitcase unceremoniously onto his bare bed, and sets to unpacking. 

In the midst of her folding her shirts into the dresser, she hears the shower stop, and the door to the bathroom open. Luther’s footsteps, which she knows to be heavy and sure, do not echo down the hall towards her, so she can tell that he’s standing in the doorway, taking his time. She keeps unpacking, and eventually, she hears his door close.

She sees him next at dinner, which is uncomfortable and silent. The table suddenly seems a thousand feet long, yet her father’s icy stare bores right into her and pins her to her seat. She stares at her plate, at the boiled greens Mom had prepared, and forces herself to eat them as her father spits his displeasure at her actions outside the house, announcing rapaciously that at least she won’t be able to ruin the family’s dignity any further now that she has come home to stay.

In the corner of her vision, she can see Luther’s torso shift. He has turned his head, to look at her. The house is so quiet now that she can hear him draw in a sharp breath.

Mercifully, it’s over quickly. Dad storms back to his study, to do whatever he feels is worth doing, and Vanya and Luther are left to finish their meal alone.

She doesn’t look at him, but she can tell he’s looking at her.

“It’s true?” He isn’t speaking loudly at all, but it’s so quiet that she can hear every word perfectly from the opposite end of the table. “You’re back?”

Vanya drags her fork across the porcelain of her plate, and nods quietly, before scraping her chair back, and hurrying out of the room.

There’s nowhere for her to go, not really, so she drifts aimlessly through the halls, pointedly avoiding the courtyard and the shining bronze statue of her still-rotting brother. Eventually, she makes it into the parlor, sinking into the cushions as she stares at the solemn, painted face of her brother.

She’s home. She’ll head down to the basement kitchen, fix a sandwich leave the lights on and wait for a while. She’d hung that torch up when she’d been shunted off to finishing school, but she’s back now, and she’ll be here for a while, if not forever, so she has a duty to uphold. 

The door slides open behind her, and she knows who it must be, but it still takes a second to truly _realize_.

Luther has never sought her out before, save for family meetings, so she braces herself for an announcement that Dad needs her, that he isn’t done yelling at her yet, that he’d like to shatter her violin against his desk and make her eat the splinters for good measure.

Instead, he sits beside her on the couch, and she becomes keenly aware of how much taller he’s grown than her, of how he shifts the cushions with his weight in a way that makes her lean towards him, of how he doesn’t mean to do so at all. Of the way his enormous, muscled arm presses into her side, and how something in her malformed, dull little heart pulses in resentment, wishing it were wiry and thin, that he and the figure in the portrait looming above them, observing them with a glassy, alien gaze, had swapped places. Of how she’s _certain_ that he wishes that she were not the sister who had returned.

(She is right. He does wish that. Do not begrudge him; he means no harm by it. Luther, like Vanya, is kind of heart. But Luther, like Vanya, is similarly hung up on a love-that-could-have-been who leapt into a world they couldn’t understand, and Luther, like Vanya, hesitated a moment too long, and lost the ability to leave with them. And Luther, like Vanya, will never forgive himself for it.)

He sits by her side for a minute, then two, then three. 

“Dad told me,” he says. “About everything that happened at school.”

“Oh,” she replies. “Did he?”

“Yes.”

It’s quiet again.

Then: “Vanya?”

“Yes?”

She doesn’t quite know what to do with him. She hasn’t carried a conversation with him in years, but now, she supposes, there is no one else for him to talk to _but_ her.

Luther has never been close with her. He’s never even really been kind to her. But one thing she knows for certain is that he loves his family, and to him, she may not be a part of the Academy, but she _is_ a part of the family. 

And for what it's worth, she's here too. She'll be here too.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, and she knows he means it.

The heat from his shoulder bleeds through her shirt, seeping into her skin. She doesn’t cling to him, and he doesn’t lean into her. But they sit nonetheless, side-by-side, staring into the dying fire beneath their missing brother’s portrait, wishing things were different, and fearing they never will be. They are not alone, and that will have to be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weird little experiment I thought I'd try, based on a rambling I did on tumblr months ago.


	2. Chapter 2

Then comes the rest of their lives. 

It passes quickly, blending in a strange wash of days and weeks and years, a sort of dilation that only hermits and Hargreeves truly understand. The days last long and long, but the weeks fly away faster than Vanya or Luther can even imagine.

Given everything, what they fall into makes a strange sort of sense. The world has shrunk to just the two of them, and alone in the dim halls of the Hargreeves mansion, one becomes desperate for anything at all. 

___________

They are eighteen, and Vanya settles in.

She combs through Ben's sparse belongings, rearranging them how she likes, feeling keenly aware of how tasteless she is being, how much like a scavenging animal she is, for climbing into her dead brother's space and tearing it apart and rearranging it to her liking.

She spends an afternoon crying about it, and a morning sleeping off the migraine her guilt brings her. Then she gets up, and resumes dragging the furniture into place.

And Luther, at the opposite end of the hall, watches her. 

There's a chasm between the two of them, between Vanya and all of them. It'd slowly started to open between them in their early childhood, in the dim, half-forgotten time when they'd been four or five; he doesn't know exactly what started it, but he assumes, like the others, that it has to do with her lack of powers. At that age it would've become clear that hers simply hadn't grown in late, and weren't there at all, and at that age their training had truly begun.

The crevasse grew wider and deeper with every passing year, faster and faster, doubling in size by the time they became teenagers. Only Five had been able to bridge that gap, using that vicious will of his, that pompous disregard for the team and their father and their mission, to embolden himself enough to step across the abyss and reach.

A part of Luther envies Five, just a bit. For all he was, none could say he wasn't brave.

(Too brave, he knows. And maybe it's too brave of him, for trying to step into his shoes, just a little. But he's alone, and there's nothing in the world worse. They aren't on opposite sides of a chasm anymore, but are at the bottom of it. They are near-strangers stranded in a mineshaft, drawn together by a crack of watery sunlight ten miles above, and they have no choice but to get to know each other while they wait for a rescue that an unconscious part of Luther already knows will not come.)

One night, he has an intense, restless dream that stays vivid in his mind long after he wakes, haunting him like one of Klaus's ghosts. In it, the room that is rustling shares a wall with him, and the girl he sees at mealtimes is seated across from him, with warm brown eyes, a cloud of dark curls, and a confident smile that he's always been able to anchor himself to whenever he's uncertain as to where to direct the team.

He wakes up. He listens.

The jostling of furniture is at the end of the hall.

He lies there for a while, dozing, staring at the deep blue sky through the window.

It's just before dawn, he learns, by checking his alarm clock, and he sighs. Vanya's adopted the internal clock of a cat, sleeping and waking when she pleases, and it doesn't fit at all with his own strictly structured schedule.

But the guilt gnawing in his gut jostles him up, sending him down the hall.

She isn't Academy, but she's family. He isn't breaking any rules, by speaking to her, by being near her.

He's reluctant to be alone, both of them are, but Vanya's long ago become accustomed to it. She knows how to keep herself occupied, without the company of others, so she's deep into the business of it. She's carefully picking through a mountain of books she'd obtained from the house library, all of which she has read before, and she starts when she hears him. 

She's used to being alone, to being ignored, and had long ago let her heart callous and harden. So when she hears him hovering like a nervous puppy by the door, something mean in her awakens, and starts snarling.

Her head cracks around like a whip to look at him, and Vanya hisses _"What?"_

Luther winces, then dips his head in overly-formal apology, and is on his way. 

They make up. The house is comprised of most of a city block; eight or nine buildings all carved into and shoved together to form one gargantuan mutant monster of a mansion, but it isn't _that_ big.

A week passes, and Vanya spends it alone. She reads through all her old favorites, stares out the window and counts people passing, resuming an old game she'd played at nine, when she'd imagine elaborate backstories for each of them. She passes Luther in the hall, and eats with him, and waits for her turn to use the bathroom after him. Quickly, they stop avoiding each other, start looking each other in the eye and nodding in awkward greeting.

She learns what has changed: the house is all but silent now, her father isn't breathing down their necks the way he once had, the security cameras have all been switched off.

Far more relevant to her specifically, certain concessions have been made for Luther; now, he isn’t bound to a uniform, and he can wear what he pleases between missions, which, she notes, consists mostly of sweatpants. Now that she is alone, now that she is the only child apart from Luther who has remained, that privilege rubs off on her, and she is allowed to wear dull sweaters and dress shirts and pairs of jeans that Pogo brings her from the outside world.

She learns his schedule: Luther wakes at exactly five-thirty in the morning, is in bed at nine. He takes most of his meals in the basement kitchen, where she's taken to having hers, and he spends six hours a day in the gymnasium.

His missions come, if only once a week or so. They used to happen every other day.

So he has a lot of free time.

And eventually, they find each other through one of the few things they have in common.

Luther is playing one of his records, and he looks up to see Vanya leaning in the doorframe, nodding her head quietly in tune.

And it starts like that. The two of them, in Luther's room, every afternoon, going through his alphabetized record list slowly, as they have all the time in the world to listen to it. They lay together, sprawled out on the floor, or slouching on his soft twin bed, which he has long since outgrown, and listen to the record of the day, which Luther allows Vanya to choose. Then, they talk about it, Luther imparting his knowledge of the musicians, and Vanya of the structure of the song itself. 

Luther doesn't understand the caustic jokes Vanya sends his way, and Vanya doesn't guide him through his ideas the way he needs. But there's someone to listen, and for two people who long ago accepted that they'd get nothing without incredible compromise, it's enough.

From there, it grows. They start smiling at each other, exchanging small-talk at meals. They are so hungry for anything at all, that they take each other, even if they keep feeling pangs of guilt in their guts over how they would each prefer someone else.

Vanya, through it all, has kept a suitcase packed, sitting by Ben's door. She looks at it every day.

Whenever she does, Vanya tells herself, _I'll leave tomorrow._

__________

They are nineteen, and Vanya has broken into their father's alcohol cabinet.

It isn't a spur-of-the-moment decision. She's been thinking about it for months now, staring at it like a child might stare at the forbidden upper kitchen cabinet where the cookie jar is stored.

She's spent months sleeping and waking at odd intervals, wandering the halls in clothes she's been wearing for weeks without a wash. She's spent months fending off particularly dark thoughts about flinging herself from the fifth-floor stairwell, or drowning herself in the bathtub. She's spent months fighting to fashion a routine that compliments her brother's, so she might have an excuse to avoid those strange compulsions that swoop at her mind like a flock of vicious crows. 

She doesn't even like to drink. It makes her nervous, she's found. She isn't sure what her medication's full of, but she knows it isn't a good idea to mix pills with alcohol. And the taste of it all just burns her throat and her chest and leaves a terrible metallic taste clinging to her teeth.

She doesn't even like it, but she does it, because its the principle of the thing: children don't go climbing into the cabinets for cookies because they actually want to eat them; it's because they've been told not to. 

She doesn't even like it, but it's November, and it's been six years since she was too nervous to get up and sprint after the only thing that might've been good about her life, and she's dutifully laid out her offerings every night since she's returned, but there's been no message from the gods and she's beginning to think they've turned their backs on her.

She doesn't even like it, but there's fuzzy warmth spreading through her chest, and in her forehead, and his portrait is blurry at the edges. It's better to look at like this; she can't make out the fine details of his face, it's easier to imagine him at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, with his face out of focus and fading.

If he were here, he'd have raided the cabinet with her. They'd be sitting upside-down on the couch with their legs hooked over the back, giggling discordantly about something stupid.

If he were here, she would not be in the house. She'd be lost in the world, but she wouldn't be alone in it, so that would be fine.

He isn't. Like that needs saying, at this point. 

He isn't, and something in her seethes at the thought. He isn't, because he couldn't have been bothered to listen to her for once, and look at them. He's gone and she's sunken so deep into a rut that she'll never find a way out.

Someone else is, and she can hear the clinking of crystal glass at the bar beyond her, as he carefully washes out the mess she's made, the clattering of glass-on-wood as he replaces the fine bottles in the cabinet, the clack of the brass-framed portrait of Five, the one she'd taken with her to school, and taken to carrying around the house with her, which she'd abandoned on the bar counter in her haste to loosen herself up. The sloshing of liquor Vanya really shouldn't have had so much of, since she's been taking twice her recommended dose lately, oh she's so, so _stupid--_

The heavy weight of the couch shifts, as her other brother joins her.

They lean into each other easily, now deeply accustomed to one anothers' company, and she lets him gently work the mostly-empty glass from her loose fingers, placing it down gently on the side table as she leans loosely, tipsily, into his arm and tosses her floppy legs over his lap.

As he does, Vanya looks up to him, taking his measure carefully.

He's very handsome, she knows, vaguely, objectively, the way she knows that Pluto is technically not a planet anymore. Her brother is handsome: he is over a head taller than her, with a flash of blonde hair that's dulling by the day now that their father doesn't bother to have a stylist in to touch it up any longer. He has an attractive face, and a powerful build. He is shaped like the sort of person she might be capable of being attracted to, and she is aware that he is attractive.

Yet, for some reason, nothing strong stirs in her when she looks at him. There's no strong flutter in her chest, or catch in her breath, or pooling of heat in her belly. Just a vague flicker of acknowledgement, that yes, he is handsome enough, but that is it.

He is good-looking, but not the sort of good-looking she wants. 

(When he looks at her, for the record, he thinks the same: Vanya is pretty, in a quiet way, but pretty nonetheless, and he can't reconcile her face with someone else's.)

But they are here, and they are familiar, and the sort of good-looking she wants left her a long time ago, and she's still clinging to his portrait, and the sort of pretty he wants left him a little sooner, and he's still staring longingly at where she'd hung up her locket on her vanity.

And maybe, just _maybe,_ if she does this, wherever in space-time he'd landed, he'll feel it, and that flicker of jealousy will draw him back to her. And maybe, if he lets her, wherever in the world she's filming her latest blockbuster, she'll feel that pang of possessive anger, and come raging back to reclaim him.

So Vanya crawls up his chest, taking his sweet face into her hands, and pulling it down to her.

And he lets her. 

When they kiss, they feel a lot of things, but not a single one is attraction. Not a single one is love, not for each other, not the sort of love that ought to come with what they're doing. But they don't have the luxury of choosing, and it's each other or no one, and there is nothing in the world worse than being alone. 

The kiss is dull and lifeless and full of the wrong kind of passion, directed at the wrong people, and it tastes like scotch and salt. It's the first one either of them has ever had, and it's terrible.

Vanya pulls apart, so they might breathe, so they might stare at each other and question for a moment what it is that they're doing.

She stares up at him, bitter and sad and deeply lonely. And he stares down at her, guilty and sad and deeply lonely.

They wait a spell, because they must see if the magic has worked.

There is no explosion of the front doors as she comes whirling in, fresh off a shining Perseus plane and full of vicious anger.

There is no blue flicker of plasma spiking down into the parlor, no manifestation of a long-lost brother pulled from the vacuum through the sheer force of his possessive fury.

There is nothing at all. Even the fire in the hearth has gone dark.

So, it seems they'll have to try again.

The next time, he pulls her up to him, and she wraps her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, and screws her eyes shut. In her imagination, his hair is brown and sleek and not so closely-shorn to his head. He folds an arm around her waist, and pretends he doesn't have to lean down so much, that her hips and her lips are fuller, that her hair only feels like this because it's been straightened so the magazines will review her appearance better.

It's enjoyable, then, when they're pretending. 

Vanya's too unsteady to navigate the stairs on her own, so he carries her effortlessly. There is nothing romantic to the gesture; she is not being carried up a velvet staircase to be ravished, only to be tucked into bed like the overgrown child she feels like she is. 

Neither of them speak; they do not need to. It would break the spell, it would make them have to say what they're thinking, and what they're thinking of is not each other.

There's a line, and they've crossed it, and they'll be crossing it again. So be it. At least they won't have to explain anything to each other.

She watches him go in silence, with a formal dip of the head, and her gaze falls on the suitcase she'd prepared. There's an inch of dust on it. She'll get around to it, soon enough. 

Vanya rolls over, and tells herself, _I'll leave next week._

__________

They are twenty, and they are trying to have sex.

They've been circling this for a long time, as one circles a routine colonoscopy. It isn't anything to be proud of, simply something that must be done, because it is something that people who are together do.

And that is what they are now: together.

They don't feel like it, most of the time. They seldom kiss, seldom hold hands, seldom touch, have never gotten their hands or mouths on each other and never felt the desire to do so. They sleep in separate bedrooms, and will not be sharing one. Their dates, if one could be generous enough to call them debates, and one must be generous, with Numbers One and Seven, consist of strolling through the rooftop courtyard, picking through the ancient observatory, and carefully avoiding the greenhouse, where Luther has been bound by their father's word to never again set foot in. They spend days without speaking to each other, and when they do, it's all small talk: the weather, the way the leaves are changing in the courtyard this autumn, Vanya's latest attempt at Stravinsky, Luther's training, the number of gray hairs peppered through Pogo's fur. Their conversations repeat themselves after a week, but they pretend they don't.

They are also in love with other people, and they continue to pay tribute to that love. Luther continues to stare longingly into Allison's bedroom, and Vanya at that strange little portrait of Five, which has not left its new place at the bar; it would feel wrong, to pick it up, after the way she'd crawled into Luther's lap and draped herself so shamelessly over him, right in the portrait's painted view. There's nothing wrong with just looking though, so she continues to sit at the bar and stare at it, daring its subject to crawl through the frame and take her back.

But. They're together. So it is. It's better than being alone.

And people who are together, in the way that they are pretending to be, have sex. At least, all the ones they've read about do. So at long last, they try.

They choose a date when Luther is statistically least likely to be called away on mission, when Vanya knows she won't be ovulating (because God knows their father, who knows all and most certainly knows about their new arrangement, will deny them protection out of some sinister scheme to force a Number Eight out of them), and they do it then.

It isn't good.

They don't really know how to kiss; all theirs have been limp and closed-lipped and tepid, and they really only do it every few days as a ritual of confirmation that yes, they are still together, in all the ways that together counts in this house. So they skip it at first, gently pulling at their clothes, staring at each others' bodies with flushed faces, reluctant to touch but knowing that this is part of it. 

They settle into the position, Vanya curled in his lap with her thighs tight around him, her face pressed into his shoulder, waiting for him to get on with it already. Her libido is near-nonexistent, buried like all her emotions under the effects of her medication, so she is particularly dispassionate about this, but she is willing to try, if only to maintain the illusion.

The illusion is important; it will send out another signal to the people they actually want to be doing this with, and because of what they are doing, it will make them especially angry. Kissing and grabbing hands at breakfast were not enough; sex will be, she's sure of it. It must be done.

And Luther, who she is clinging to, who is meant to be getting on with it, is thinking it over. He's never had someone else's bare skin up against his before, and he finds the warmth of it fascinating. But he can feel her reluctance in the way she's coiling her limbs. He can tell her mind's leagues away, and her heart is somewhere even further away.

And Luther, who somehow still believes firmly that the world is good, that things happen for a reason, and that there is a purpose in every action, feels horrible about this. 

For one, they are _Luther_ and _Vanya._

Intimacy isn't a thing they ever learned. None of them have ever done anything like this before, neither knows quite how it works, and they're always so far behind everyone else, always hesitating too long and having the door slammed shut in their faces. They've lost out on everything: friends, loves, careers, homes and lives of their own. It follows that sex is another thing that has slipped from their grasp. They waited too long, and now it's too late to learn. They've crossed that invisible threshold from adolescence into adulthood, without so much as having been kissed, and that invisible window of time in which they had been given to learn had slid shut on them, long before they even realized it was there.

(He's okay with that, he is. He has to be: He's not just an ordinary person. He has a grand destiny. He's going to save the world. It's okay if he misses all those things, because it will only focus him more on the great mission of his life.)

(The thing that unsettles him is that Vanya isn't like him. She's supposed to have these things, and they all fell away from her, and left her with nothing. The universe isn't cruel, he _knows_ it isn't, so he doesn't understand why it's being so cruel to her.)

For another, they are _Luther and Vanya._

A long, long time ago, Luther, who believed that all things happened for a reason, and that one had to put great intention into all his actions to ensure that those reasons remained good, had made a secret promise to himself, about who he wanted to have like this.

And to put it as simply as he can, Vanya isn't her. 

And it wouldn't be fair, not to Vanya, not to Allison, not to him, not to Five, for them to be doing this.

It doesn't really matter, if the tabloids Pogo reads and he fishes out of the recycling to pick through for news of Allison say she's on her fifth boyfriend this month alone. It doesn't really matter, if Five fucked off to the future and found someone and made a home with them.

The principle of the thing is what matters, and the principle here is that both of them care about this, and neither of them particularly wants it with each other. 

They aren't meant for each other, and they know it, and they can't hide it like this, stripped bare and staring directly at each other, without layers of clothing and formality to hide that reluctant affection. The way they're moving is utterly unnatural, like they're attached to invisible strings and being maneuvered, having their stiff limbs juddered into place to press them against each other. 

They are together because they cannot be alone, but they are doing _this_ because it is expected of them.

It isn't fair, and because it isn't fair, and because Luther still sees the world in black-and-white, he decides that it cannot happen. This will not be a part of the relationship they share.

So he pulls back, gently pulls her off of him, and drags his legs out from under her, pulling the blankets up to cover himself.

He can feel her eyes, burning into him, hear the ragged catch in her breath, the invisible insistence: they have to _try,_ doesn't he _see?_ They have to do _something_ to bring them back.

But the thing is: "They're not coming back, Vanya."

She doesn't respond, but he listens to the way her breathing changes.

He keeps his gaze fixed firmly on the grain of the floorboards beneath his feet, and feels the mattress jostle as Vanya gathers her clothes, and leaves in a hush.

Down the hall, the door slams. He listens to her kick that suitcase she never unpacked, and the muffled growl of her mouth screaming into her pillow, and he feels terrible. 

He lies back on his bed, and reaches up, over the headboard, to touch the wall he shares with Allison. 

In Vanya's room, she's crying in frustration, picking up the scattered belongings she'd crammed into that damn suitcase, promising herself that this is it, telling herself, _I'll leave next month._

__________

They are twenty-one, and have settled into each other, like one settles into an old pair of shoes with holes at the heel and toe. They aren't exactly the right fit anymore, and they cannot possibly be used for walking anywhere, but they fit your foot just _so,_ and you've become so attached to them that you can't bear to seek out a new pair.

They are not truly safe, nor are they truly happy, but they are comfortable here, in the great old house that sags year after year. They are comfortable, as two frogs in a pot being drawn steadily to a boil are comfortable; it is killing them, but they are used to it, they are abiding of it. Their world is small, and it contains the two of them, and they know how to navigate it. 

They do not sleep in the same bed, or the same room. They have never slept together, nor will they. They talk, now and again, repeating the same inane topics so often they have an entire script memorized. 

They stop pretending like what they're doing is going to bring them back. 

The gaping wound in their connection, torn by that guilt, begins to scab over.

They are both in love with someone else, but they'd rather be together than alone, and as long as they're both on the same page, maybe what they're doing is okay.

(All the books Vanya's read say it isn't. There are definitions for what sort of relationship they must have because of what a few lines on a piece of paper in their father's office claim they are to each other. There are parameters they must follow if they want to be the thing that all the encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks Vanya has uncovered in the library that dare to discuss the topic say they must never, _ever_ be.)

(They follow none of it. They discuss it once, quietly, nervously, as if someone might hear them, as if someone would care.)

(In the end, they agree that it doesn't matter. No one who's written those definitions out has even encountered a family such as theirs.)

(It is okay. It is okay. It is okay. It is not ideal, it is not desirable, it is not even good, but it is okay. And for them, because it is okay, it will have to be enough.)

Maybe it isn't cruel then, to lean in when she and Luther are listening to his records, and pretend that she's dancing with someone whose face she can't even picture anymore. It can't be cruel, because Luther is not cruel, and he is doing the same.

They settle into a life together. They wake early, and go to bed early. They eat mostly in the basement kitchen, and to pass time, they watch Mom cook for them, and try, with little success, to replicate her recipes. Luther spends six hours a day in the gymnasium, and Vanya spends that time with her violin. 

He leaves on missions sometimes, once a week or once every two weeks, or once every three weeks, and she sees him out when he goes, and flutters nervously at Grace's side when he returns.

They keep up their rituals, like they're priests attending to the temple of gods who've left them long ago. Vanya keeps all the lights on, and makes her sandwiches, and sets them out. Luther sits in front of the telephone every day, staring at it for nearly an hour, repeating the number scrawled in Dad's study over and over in his head, daring himself to pick it up.

In the evenings, they sit side by side in the courtyard, rain or shine, snow or sun, and listen to the branches of the stunted oak tree rustle, thinking about the decisions they should have made, the people they should have left with, and never did.

They can't stay like this, Vanya knows, in the same way that she knows that the world will end someday. Sometime, it will come crashing down, but it won't be today, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month. They can't stay like this forever, but just for a while longer, they will be just fine.

Vanya peers up at the window to the room that had once been Ben's and is now hers, where that old suitcase is still waiting by her door. Then she turns her face into Luther's shoulder, and nuzzles it weakly, telling herself, _I'll leave next year._

__________

They are twenty-two, and Luther leaves on a routine mission to stop a run-of-the-mill bioattack.

Vanya is waiting by the door to wish him well with a wan smile, and he nods reassuringly at her, nervously playing with the collar of his cumbersome uniform. Then, he's gone, and she returns to her copy of _Mathilda._

He comes home in pieces. 

Vanya hovers in absolute terror in the doorway of the infirmary, staring at the bloodied mass of flesh bulging from Luther's torso, wincing at the way their father plunges the serum into his chest, gaping at how his muscle regrows, and keeps growing and growing, the way coarse apelike fur settles in over him. She swallows three pills in one sitting, she's so afraid.

In the hours before she knows whether he'll live or die, she realizes this is the time that Luther devotes to sitting in front of the phone, rehearsing what he might say over and over again. In his absence, it falls to her to maintain the ritual, so she approaches the phone with the same trepidation he might approach a landmine. Vanya hasn't dialed a telephone number in years, hasn't spoken to Allison for far longer, so it isn't hard at all to lose the courage to call her. She feels terrible about it for a while, imagines the family convening for his funeral, imagines the look on Allison's face when she realizes what happened, and that no one told her.

Then, Pogo arrives and tells her: he'll be fine. He's stable, and simply in a deep sleep, which he assures her is temporary.

 _So it's okay,_ Vanya tells herself, _that Allison doesn't know._

Then, her father speaks to her for the first time in months, and tells her the whole truth, that Pogo had carefully avoided: Luther may not wake for years.

Vanya sits in the room that had once been Ben's and is now hers, stares at her suitcase, and starts laughing for the first time in years, a strange, hollow gagging sound.

Vanya isn't leaving. How _stupid_ is she?

__________

They are twenty-three, and Vanya waits.

Of course she does; she is practiced in waiting by now.

It seems some sort of cruel joke on the part of a God that Vanya isn't quite certain exists, that she must always wait and wait and wait for brothers she loves in an unbrotherly way to return to her, one from the depths of space-time, one from the depths of his own mind.

Vanya has moved her bed into the infirmary, and has Mom bring her meals and books and magazines and and sheet music to her there. She lives in that small out-of-the-way room now, bathing hurriedly in the little decontamination shower around the corner. She lives here, sleeping here, eating here, reading and playing here, so he might always have someone by his side. 

Vanya only leaves for two hours every day, once in the morning, and once in the evening, when Mom is there to run Luther's vitals. In that time she makes her sandwiches, turns on the lights, and sits at the phone, or else wanders the halls listlessly.

Being away from him makes her nervous now; Luther will wake up someday, and their arrangement is contingent on not being alone. He won't wake to someone who loves him in the way he ought to be loved, but he will not wake alone. This, she is determined to ensure.

She takes Luther's warped pawlike hand into her own, and draws out an anthology, and begins reading from it. Her voice is soft and stilted, unused to being brought out for more than a few scattered words a day, and she quickly loses it. But she keeps going. If he can hear her, he might come back.

__________

They are twenty-four, and Vanya waits.

Luther is still asleep, still stable, still lost deep within himself, and her voice is not like Allison's; it is ordinary, so of course it did not have the power to stir him from his slumber. She feels very stupid for thinking it would.

Five hasn't returned, because of course he hasn't.

And Allison has married, and become a mother in less than nine months, so she supposes that solves that on whether the baby was planned. 

Neither of them receive an invitation to the wedding. Vanya reads about it in the tabloid that Pogo subscribes to, cutting out the articles and storing them in a box, as she does to all articles featuring Allison's name or face, for Luther to read when he awakens.

She's doing romantic comedies now, pretending that she lives in a happy world where people might love her for who she is, where people might love her at all. Maybe someday, they'll get permission to have a reel sent to the house, so they might watch Allison's wooden performances.

In the meantime, Vanya is bored, so desperately _bored,_ that she sets eyes on an ancient typewriter of their father's in a neglected corner of the basement. She wipes an inch of dust from its keys, carries it up to the infirmary, and fills her days with something else. 

Vanya is not technically alone, but she still feels like it. She's had far too much time with her thoughts, and she's been picking over their childhood with a fine-toothed comb, and loses hours imagining herself as a confident, self-assured woman the self-help books (with such titles as _Coping With Failure,_ or _Overcoming Low Self Esteem With Music_ , or _Hang In There, Girl! A Cool Dad's Guide To Puberty_ ) Pogo sent her as birthday presents when she was at boarding school kept promising she'd be. 

So, because she has nothing but time, she decides to write it: a rumination on her childhood, which is true enough from her point of view, and a grand vision of her life as a successful musician, which is objectively a lie. She says nothing about Luther; there's nothing that can be said, and this thing they have is just for them.

She doesn't expect the company she sends the manuscript, mediocre and error-filled and sappy as it is, to actually want to publish it. But they do.

Each of her siblings finds a copy. Diego, in the bargain bin at the used book shop. Klaus, at the mediocre Lakeshore Views Rehabilitation Center library. Allison, because her manager had planted it on her breakfast table. Five, all alone in the end of everything, picking through the Argyle Branch of the Public Library. The former two burst out laughing at the boldfacedness of Vanya's lies, the latter don't even realize that she's being mistruthful.

It flops; she is unavailable for press or readings or photo opportunities, so the promotion is sloppy at best, but enough copies leak out for Allison to be quoted in the _Tinsel Town Tattler_ laughing it off as derivative fanfiction. After all, there is no proof that Vanya Hargreeves even exists.

Vanya shrugs, finishing cutting out Allison's vicious words, and places them in the box with the rest.

__________

They are twenty-five, and Luther wakes up, and she is there, and it doesn't really matter. 

She isn't enough to comfort him, but she is far from nothing, and he is deeply grateful for her company. She skips her rituals of devotion, and cares not at all. He reads all the articles she'd saved for him, and realizing that Allison is well and truly out of reach, now as out of reach as her Five is, he places the box reverently under the bed, and swallows the wave of feelings threatening to overwhelm them.

There's a moment, a moment that sparks into being and burns bright as a star, where they're huddled together, coasting high on relief and the simple joy of knowing that things might be alright after all, that he will be mutated but he will live, where the both of them think that they might not need to pantomime the sort of love they want, that they might be able to move forward together and be not only comfortable, but happy together.

It's a moment. And the spark is there, but it's snuffed out immediately.

Because a week later, he's covered up to the neck in an outdated Hargreeves astrosuit model, touted before cameras that are forbidden to acknowledge Vanya, and off to the depths of space. And that is that.

__________

They are twenty-six, and he's been on the face of the moon for a year. 

In that year, Vanya has made it a point to introduce a new routine into her life: she devotes herself to Luther’s missions.

She waits eagerly for his reports, for his many samples of moondust and asteroid chunk and vials of stardust that she sorts according to his meticulous directions in one of the long-abandoned laboratories in the west wing of the house. She has no idea what she's being asked to do, but it's something to occupy her time, so she takes it.

She pours over his curt discussions of his research and his requests for supplies, and now that she is bound by a will far more extraordinary than her own, she at last has the strength to approach her father at mealtime, and beg for supplies, not that he ever listens.

She doesn’t succeed, not really. Most of the time she has to write back that she is trying, very, very hard, she is so very sorry that she isn't good enough to get him more tools, more books, more rations.

He responds kindly. He is sure that their father is trying. She isn’t, but she keeps that to herself. Their arrangement is not one in which they challenge each other; it's never been about growing, but about avoiding wilting too much.

Vanya writes to him every single day. Her letters span for pages, and are typewritten. They discuss anything and everything: detailed observations of the minimal goings-on about the house, mentions of Vanya’s many medical checkups (she is being used as the control for the various tests Luther is running on himself at his station, and is fine with it, because she is just happy to be of help somehow, really, truly, she _is,_ she promises), opinions about books she has reread a dozen times, answers to research questions he has sent her that require long hours in the library pouring over dull physics and natural science textbooks. 

Every letter ends with a quiet description, transcribed carefully from tabloids she has taken up subscribing to, and paging through for news of the only celebrity she cares for.  The descriptions come with no comment attached. There is nothing that she can say that merits saying. She knows why he needs to know, and he knows why she’ll give it to him.

Luther ends all of his mission reports with matter-of-fact statements about time dilation in the stars. He’s looking too.

Their rituals have a different shape now, but they've resumed. They've come to understand that this is just something they can't get past. And that's okay, because the limbo they're in is one they're enduring together.

__________

They are twenty-seven, and there is more distance between the two of them than there has ever been between a pair of lovers (she and Five cannot be called that, you see, nor can Luther and Allison; the latter haven’t even kissed, while the former haven’t even admitted aloud that that is what they had been hurtling towards becoming), if one could be generous enough to call Vanya and Luther that.

(And one  _ must  _ be generous, especially with the Hargreeves children. Numbers One and Seven have had so little in the way of luck, of kindness, of love of any kind, that it would be cruel to peer at their relationship and snip about how  _ it doesn’t count.) _

(Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps Five's thirty-something years with his mannequin wife don't count. Perhaps the dozens of people Allison has rumored into bed, and the one she rumored into wedlock with her don't count. It doesn't matter, because it matters to them. It is what they have, and they make do with it, as best as they can.)

They are twenty-seven, and they are practiced at this routine of waiting, and writing, and waiting, and writing, and waiting, and waiting, and _waiting_ and…

A million miles away, Luther makes a quiet discovery off in the dark space between two distant stars, and he tells Vanya about it. He isn't supposed to be doing much other than watching for threats, but space is beautiful, and he simply can't help himself. He has nothing but time; of _course_ he can multitask.

Millions upon millions of light-years away, there are two small, scarred celestial bodies, circling each other in the dark void. They'd been planets once, circling suns of their own, but their suns had winked out of being or else vanished, sending them hurtling deeper and deeper into wild space, unanchored and vulnerable.

By some virtue of chance, these two specific former planets slipped into one another's sphere of influence, and they'd caught each other in the middle of freefall. And here, enclosed in his latest report, is an image of them, dancing slowly in the dark, all alone in the center of nothing. 

He doesn't explain what it means. She gets it anyway.

__________

They are twenty-eight, and the _Tattler_ runs a six-page story on Allison's divorce, and her loss of custody. Vanya dutifully transcribes the entire thing. _Maybe she'll call the house,_ Vanya says.

When she receives a response, she learns that there's been a strange flare-up of St. Elmo's Fire somewhere just beyond Mars. _Maybe he landed there,_ Luther writes, _maybe he's alive and well and has been alone all this time, thinking up ways to get back to you._

They keep waiting, each a little more eager. Each, a little bit guilty that they're so excited that their counterparts' lives might be as miserable as their own, that that misery will chart a course that will bring them back together.

__________

They are twenty-nine, and Luther receives a transmission from Vanya: _Dad's dead. Come home._


	3. Chapter 3

Luther comes home.

He comes home without fanfare, with nothing but the leotard on his back, and that's fine by him. He isn't sure how much excitement he can take; he nearly breaks into tears when he stepped out of the rocket that bore him home, and feels the humid Cape Canaveral air seep into his lungs. He's never been more excited to slip back into the dim, enormous halls of his family home, where things make sense and where his shoulders don't brush the walls every time he turns.

He's the first of them all to arrive, and he's greeted by Vanya, who has grown out her bangs in the years since he's seen her, but is otherwise exactly the same.

She nearly suffocates him with the intensity of her embrace, leaping down from the steps to cling to him. He returns it hesitantly, then hungrily, lifting her clean off the ground and hearing her choke out a soft huff of a laugh as her toes kick playfully at his knees. He is so relieved to be touching anyone at all, that he doesn't once think of Allison while he holds her. 

Inside the cool foyer, he shakes hands with Pogo, who expresses his deepest condolences, and Grace gives him a placid plastic kiss, which he tolerates. 

He regards her carefully; Vanya had told him that in the four years he'd been on the moon, her hardware had begun to degrade significantly, but she'd made as many adjustments as she could. Something'd gone wrong a few days ago, Vanya had said in her last report before he'd been called home. She'd started forgetting things, started losing the ability to tell where she was.

A problem to be solved later, he decides, when Vanya tugs at his sleeve and insists that he needs to know about their father.

Vanya sits him in the foyer, under the watchful painted eyes of their dead father and missing brother, and tells him, wringing her hands all the while, about how she and Pogo had discovered their father in bed. About the autopsy report, which had yielded a run-of-the-mill heart attack. About what she'd found in Grace's pocket, their father's monocle, which she had deduced meant that Grace had been in his room, had interacted with his body, and had not raised an alarm.

Luther draws in a low breath, and sighs, realizing that Grace's programming decay may be well beyond repair. That so soon after they scatter their father's ashes, they may have to hold a separate service for their mother.

(In this universe, Luther had not been completely alone for years on end, and had a close companion with eyes in his home, with judgment he'd come to trust deeply. In this universe, Luther never worries about his father's death. He accepts the autopsy report without complaint, and Reginald's murder mystery game fizzles to a flat stop before it really starts.)

(Of course it does; Reginald Hargreeves had planned meticulously to reunite his team, but had never once considered the only member of the family to not be a part of the Academy.)

In this universe, Luther rolls the monocle over and over in his fingers, and quietly pockets it, thanking Vanya quietly. She smiles wanly, and leans into his shoulder.

Theirs isn't a natural intimacy, but it's one born of years of knowing each other. They are all they have for a little while longer, and they've been alone for so long.

Luther closes his eyes, taking in the quiet of the Academy halls. There is no ambient hum of the oxygen recycler; just the distant clacking of Grace's heels against checkerboard tile. He should be able to relax now; there is no risk that he'll suddenly find himself unable to breathe, trapped in a steel sarcophagus far from anyone who might help him.

Still, he feels something stirring in him, and by now he's had it gnawing into his mind so often that he knows immediately what it is, recognizing it as guilt.

He is feeling Vanya's head press into his side, peering down and noting that she is watching the portrait of the brother who she should be holding right now, and he doesn't feel jealous at all.

After all, he hadn't thought of Vanya much at all, up on the moon. 

It isn't her fault, it isn't even _his_ fault; it's just the nature of their relationship: Vanya helps him survive, but she never inspires a will to _live._

Now that he is back, now that their father is dead and burned to ash, now that he is on Earth and his mission has concluded and the world is seemingly safe, he doesn't need to think about survival. He's going to have to learn to live, and she won't be able to help him. 

(The guilt comes from this: he knows he can't leave her alone, because Luther believes in fairness, and it would not be fair to leave her in the house with no one. He knows that he will force himself to stay. And he knows that he will begin to hate her for it.)

\----------

In the hours that follow, the family arrives, descending on the house like a pack of scavengers, here to see the old man laid to rest, to know without a shadow of a doubt that he is well and truly dead, and incapable of any further harm. And, of course, to root through his will and take what inheritance they can.

First comes Diego; he's sauntering about the house like a hyena, having broken into a side entrance unannounced, checking the windows for signs of forced entry. In this universe, Luther does not confront him in their father's room, and when Diego at last finds him, sitting in the basement kitchen, reading the paper, he is quick to agree with his brother's assertion that their father's death had likely been natural. 

(In this universe, Pogo is staring with increasing distress at Luther, wondering how on earth he will be able to salvage his master's final wish. He won't.)

Then Klaus, slinking in less quietly, but still unannounced. The vulture has descended, and he is picking at the carcass of the house for things he might sell for drug money. Ben is behind him, the shadow that none but he is aware of, clucking disapprovingly at Klaus's actions, not that his brother can hear him, being doped up as he is.

Then, Allison clicks in confidently with the gait of a predatory cat, an enormous suitcase rolling in behind her. She is newly-divorced, newly-childless, and in the difficult process of reforming herself without her rumor. 

The former three know, vaguely, that Vanya had been lying about her own success in her book. They've been around the city enough to know that she isn't listed among the St. Pluvium Chamber Orchestra's roster, where the best classically-trained musicians in the city are employed. They know, vaguely, that she stayed home. 

The latter has no idea. When she greets Vanya, she does so magnanimously, with open arms, incorrectly welcoming Vanya back to the house she'd only left for a few short months as a seventeen-year-old. When Vanya politely corrects her, she blinks her enormous eyes blankly, and replies, _"Oh."_

\----------

Ben knows immediately.

He's broken from Klaus's side, just long enough to scope out his old bedroom. 

He dislikes leaving Klaus to his own devices, because much like a poorly-trained pet ferret, his first impulse is to burrow into anything and everything in search of trouble. But in this instance, with Klaus dozing on his childhood bed in the room that had expanded to absorb Vanya's, he thinks it's okay to slip down the hall to look at his old emo band posters. 

He doesn't find them; instead, he learns that his room's been inhabited.

A part of him is awash in possessive anger, but then he sees the sheet music, and the stand, and the stack of notebooks and the antique typewriter, and he knows who'd occupied it.

(To which he thinks, _really? Klaus was the one who took your room, not me._ )

(And then he recalls, a bit sourly, that he's been dead for over a decade, and won't exactly need a place to sleep, so he decides to let it slide.)

And then he sees one of Luther's enormous turtlenecks wadded up among her blankets on the bed.

He thinks for exactly five seconds, about what it must be like, to be alone in the house with no one but Luther, and then he claps a hand over his mouth, realizing what must have transpired.

"Oh, shit," he says, shaking his head and sprinting to Klaus to share the news. "Oh _shit."_

\----------

Klaus, who had been told by Ben, cannot flee from their father's study fast enough when Luther enters and demands he show their father's desk respect.

In many universes, he leaves with the gilded box and immediately sets to work bashing it open, leaving its contents for a certain revenge-seeker to pilfer through in a Dumpster behind the Academy.

In this universe, he's far hungrier for something to gossip about with Ben, so he keeps his ear planted to the carved oak door, listening to Luther admit his knowledge of Allison's divorce. God, he can just _feel_ the sexual tension starting to spark up again, this is going to be a _mess._

("Oh, this is so much," Ben says to himself, intangible to all, watching Luther stare at Allison the way he catches himself staring at Klaus sometimes. "This is so _much.")_

In this universe, Pogo finds Klaus there, crouched and eavesdropping, and glares disapprovingly at the spoils of his scavenging.

In this universe, Klaus hands it over with an exaggerated pout, and chooses instead to pawn the oryx head, after leaping onto it from the second-story balcony, and using his body weight and a rudimentary understanding of physics to snap it from its place mounted on the wall.

In this universe, Leonard Peabody watches the entrance of the Hargreeves house for hours, and obtains no book of secrets. Instead, he relies on a dogeared, highlighted copy of Extra Ordinary he'd bought from a secondhand bookstore on sale, and a plan based on a version of Vanya that she'd dreamed up in her own mind. 

(In this universe, the cell built to contain the last of their father's secrets gathers dust in the darkness beneath the foundation of the mansion, and there it will stay, alone and unknown, until long after the world is saved.)

(In this universe, the house will remain standing. Pogo will not be skewered, Grace will not be buried in a mountain of rubble. The cell will be discovered as an afterthought, years from now, the product of an unlucky Diego stumbling across a secret elevator in his quest to locate the most obscure of Klaus's drug stashes before his brother can.) 

\----------

Luther combs through his records, and selects his favorite, as he does in many universes.

In this one, he doesn't listen to it alone.

Eager to resurrect their ancient custom, Vanya has joined him in his bedroom, legs folded on the bed they've never shared. She's comfortable in the house, not one to sit anxiously in the foyer stairwell, waiting to be shown out unceremoniously. In his years away, she spent many hours sitting in his room, picking through his books and models and records, so she does not feel like she's imposing at all by being here. 

The song plays, the same one you're thinking of, and everyone in the house hears it, and responds accordingly. In most universes, including this one, they're all dancing alone, or else bobbing their heads along in excitement. 

Vanya doesn't dance this time. Instead, she leans forward, watching Luther dance dopishly, so excited to be back, to not be alone anymore, that he could care less that the only person he's been comfortable with in years is watching him. When his great fist knocks his favorite model airplane from the ceiling, it clatters into her lap, and she bursts out laughing.

On the other side of the wall, Allison stops dead in her tracks. Her bright pink boa floats to the ground, and she stares in the direction of Luther's bedroom, slackjawed at what she's just heard, and what it means.

She knows. 

\----------

The sky opens wide, and the earth trembles, and even in this universe, Luther and Allison reach for each others' hands, and hold on tightly.

Even in this universe, Vanya could care less; her own long-lost confidante is in the process of returning to her: in the midst of a cyclone of fluorescent blue temporal energy, the final factor in this most unfortunate of love quadrangles emerges, and is spat by the space-time continuum at her feet.

Number Five returns, as he does in most universes, just in time for the funeral. And, as is the case in most universes, he comes back both older and younger than all of his litter.

(An aside: One must be generous with the Hargreeves siblings, and with their love. They have so little of it, you see. For people as odd as One and Three and Five and Seven, such a strong animal sort of magnetism is felt so rarely. And for One and Seven, they had simply never had it; they'd been two moths, fluttering in the dark around each other simply because there is no source of light to lavish their love on. The stars they'd once orbited are back now, you see, and they bring with them a gravity far stronger than that of Vanya and Luther's own shared experience.)

(A relevant question, from Vanya's notes to Luther soon after he'd shared that image of the planets: _Suppose the suns come back. Which is more likely, that they will pull the planets apart, or that the planets themselves will be drawn to them?)_

(An answer, entirely unscientific, because their conversation had been entirely unscientific: _If you can't tell, does it matter?)_

(She had never answered him. She'd never needed to.)

Luther and Allison are holding hands, at long last, and Five and Vanya are holding a gaze, at long last, and the center of gravity has shifted, permanently. 

Their old flames have sparked back into being, and Luther and Vanya, bound by the unknowable chemical code written into their minds and hearts, are drawn to them.

Their suns are back, and their orbits have shifted, and now begins the pull.

\----------

At the basement kitchen table, Vanya asks all the right questions, as she does in most universes where Five returns in such a way. She asks about his age, about Delores, and she isn't subtle at all to those who know what she is hoping for.

She sits beside Luther, and Five is too besotted with his sandwich, and with annoying Diego (an old favorite pastime), to think too much of the change in seating arrangement, or the way Allison and Klaus are staring at it.

But he notices it. _Oh,_ he notices it.

\----------

Vanya finds him in front of his portrait, so in some vague way, she's correct that it would draw him in from the great beyond.

They are alone together for the first time in years, and everything is different, and nothing is.

He stares at her for a long while. He had no clear picture in his head as to what Vanya would look like, the book being published without any photos of her, but he'd had a lot of ideas. Her hair would be shorter, _no,_ longer, _no,_ dyed black, _no,_ shorn close to her head... She'd be in brighter clothes with a smear of lipstick over her mouth, and the sharp look in her dark eyes that he'd catch glimpses of would be there all the time.

So seeing her for the first time felt like a punch to the gut for completely different reasons. It wasn't the act of realizing what she looks like, but simply seeing her _face,_ in front of him and suddenly within reach, that had left him speechless.

 _(Within reach,_ he thinks bitterly. He'd been so shocked by being back that he hadn't realized he'd shrunken down into his teenage self. She's within reach at last, and he can't even touch her, not for _years._ Some cosmic joke. He'd like to kick God's ass.)

This isn't what he'd expected: Vanya, somehow even smaller than he'd left her, wearing dull, oversized clothes, her hair exactly the same, but tied back so tightly he's half certain her scalp is aching. Her face is pale, the shadows under her eyes are deep, and her voice is a soft quiver, missing all of the bite he'd used to love.

He compliments her on her ballsiness, and she hangs her head, admitting that she'd been here the whole time. That she's a lot of things, but ballsy isn't one of them. 

Then come the deep thunderous footsteps of his massive younger brother, and she turns abruptly on her heel and hurries after him, as if she'd been summoned.

Five stares after her.

Like Allison, he feels, in that deep, chemical sort of way that people who feel the way they do know things, what has happened in his absence. But he doesn't believe it. He _can't._

\----------

It's time for the funeral.

They stand apart from everyone else, falling into place near each other. They are soldiers, standing at attention-- no, that is too generous, for Vanya has never been trained for war as her siblings have. He is casting a shadow, long and dark, and she is sheltering in it, and in the comfort of that darkness, her posture is perfect.

She holds her umbrella high, trying to shelter the both of them from the rain, but in the process has drenched the both of them. It's too small to fit them both, and Luther's head brushes against the spidery metal skeleton of the umbrella. He's too polite to say it's scratching him, and she's too polite to say that the angle at which she's had to hold is sending all the icy runoff water dripping in a steady stream onto her head, down the back of her neck, and along her spine.

They stand, pretending there is nothing strange about this arrangement. Allison is staring at the rotting leaves kicked up by her heeled boots, and her eyes are red and wet. She isn't crying over her father.

They stand before their family, in a loose half-circle around them, who watch dispassionately as Luther empties their father into a mediocre pile in the courtyard.

Ben's statue hovers over them all. The shiny spots where Vanya would gently pat his knee, and Luther would hold his bronze fingers are still bright. In Luther's absence, Vanya has taken to holding Ben's hand. The subject of said statue is staring at those traces of touch now, as the family conducts their funeral.

In this universe, Luther hesitates for a long while before he speaks.

(In this universe, Luther had someone speaking to him all those years on the moon. He knows that his father wasn't looking at his reports.)

(In most universes, it takes Luther a while to realize exactly how horribly he was mistreated. In this one, he's a few steps further down the path than he otherwise would have been.)

But he's still One, still responsible for rallying the family together, and their father's still their father. Ideals such as his trap their victims like quicksand, and Luther hasn't yet pulled himself out of it.

So he praises their father, and Diego, as one might expect, doesn't take kindly to it.

They fight, as they are prone to in most universes, and Five abandons it immediately, far more besotted with the business of saving the world, and Diego takes it a step too far, as he always does. He draws his knife, lets it fly, and aims it just so, so it might dig into Luther's arm, so he might be reminded that he can be harmed.

In this universe, when Luther's cut, when he charges for the infirmary with his gloved hand clutched over his wound, Vanya makes a distressed, mouselike little noise, and scurries off after him.

And Diego stares after her, slowly processing what he's seen.

Then, it lands, and there's no snide cutting comeback this time. There's nothing he can possibly say. He just stares after them, glances around, bug-eyed. At Klaus, who's studiously avoiding eye contact. At Allison, staring at the door they'd just entered, her lips pressed in a tense line with a deeply furrowed brow and such a sad look in her eyes.

He knows.

\----------

Five vanishes for a long stretch of hours after sunset, and Vanya suddenly feels all alone in the middle of an angry sea, bobbing on waves of uncertainty. If it hadn't been for everyone else, she'd be certain she'd dreamed it all up. 

He comes back in a flash, finding her in the basement kitchen, making another peanut-butter-marshmallow sandwich, in the hopes that the act of making it will bring him back to her. 

(She's right, in a strange, disconnected way. Correlation, not causation, but she'll take it. It makes all those hundreds of nights she spent sitting in front of a dim yellow lamp, waiting and waiting and waiting, worth it.)

Five leans in the doorway, silent, watching her work. His arm's trailing blood onto the tile, he's just killed a dozen men and in this universe, as in most others, he still wants to come to her, first of all.

Five had been aiming for November of 2002, the very afternoon he'd left, but that had gone belly-up, and he's determined to work with what he has.

And what he has, or what he thought he had, was Vanya. He carried her book with him always, had it read it front to back and back to front and memorized entire passages of it as if it were a gospel.

He didn't know what she'd look like, had entertained himself for hours thinking about how she might've changed over the years.

He _did_ have a very concrete idea of what she'd _be_ like. Five had read her book after all. He'd had no reason to believe that Vanya, who'd been his confidante, who'd been a lot of things to him that only in the twilight of his life and after many years with Delores he's come to understand, had lied. He expected to be greeted by the Vanya of _Extra Ordinary:_ confident, ruminative, assured in herself and optimistic about the future.

He didn't expect _this._

He didn't expect a Vanya who's even more of a shadow of herself than he'd left her. He keeps staring at her as she tends to his arm, as he tells her what he'd seen. He keeps expecting her to suddenly shed off the decay of years gone by, to snap up, young again, and demand that they plan, to ask how she might be of help.

She doesn't. The news that the world will end in eight days slides off her like water slides off the feathers of a seabird.

(In this and many universes, her rumor simply doesn't allow her to consider it at all, you see. Ordinary people aren't meant to save the world, aren't even meant to process that it's ending. She is still no exception.)

He tells her, and she pours him coffee, but she sheds it off, and tells him they need to go to bed. That his room is exactly as he'd left it, that he needs to rest, and they will worry about it all later.

He watches her go, and moves to follow, walking soundlessly in her shadow as she taps up to the children's hallway.

And then he freezes. 

Vanya's quiet, worried murmur comes rumbling down the hall to him, a fragment of _I'm-worried-about-him-do-you-think-we-should_ , accompanied by the massive shape of Luther, reaching down with an enormous arm to gently, ever so gently, pull Vanya to his side.

And he knows. Oh, he _knows._

\----------

Allison finds him at the bar, half through a bottle of whiskey.

"The world's ending, Allison. Did you know that?"

"Yeah? I fucking saw."

"They're... _How?"_

Allison snatches the bottle from his bony hand, finishing it off. They're both feeling a lot of things right now, and they both want nothing more in the world than to not feel them at all. The burning of the alcohol in their throats is a welcome distraction from the ache in their hearts. 

Allison and Five are very similar creatures, you see. Both are deeply vain and besotted with themselves, and both had followed their egos out into a cruel world devoid of any sort of love or kindness. Both are selfish creatures, used to hoarding their feelings the way dragons guard their gold. Both are utterly out of their depth.

Allison has a new rule governing her conduct now; much as she wants to wish the world back into order, she knows the cost of it now, and she knows she can't pay it.

If it had been Diego, Five'd be spitting venom, ready to leap in and claw his way back to his proper place. If it'd been Ben, he'd swallow his feelings like broken glass and stand by, waiting vigilantly for an opening. (It would never be Klaus. Five knows this with absolute certainty.)

... But it's _Luther._ He doesn't know _what_ to think.

Allison does: The only possible world in which Vanya and Luther get together is one in which the fault lays squarely on them.

"We fucked up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... Not even gonna bullshit here: I'm picturing like... That Sequence from the first episode of Ouran High School Host Club, where everyone Finds Out About Haruhi. The one with the lightbulbs slowly flicking on? That's what's up with the Hargreeves right now, as they're slowly processing what's up with Luther and Vanya.


	4. Chapter 4

Luther's body wakes on Earth, but his mind is still on the moon.

He jerks awake stiffly, limbs straining from the weight of a gravity he hasn't felt in four years, and they ache with a bone-deep pain. He slaps his extra-durable alarm clock, and then the model that Vanya had graciously re-hung for him slaps him in the head again. 

His arms pull through his overcoat, another heavy barrier that's a necessity against the cold. On the moon, his layers protected him from the deep freeze of the vacuum of space; on Earth, it's to shield him from the icy gazes of any who don't yet know his shame. 

It isn't until he's out the door and staring down the hall, at the ajar door to the room that once been Ben's and is now Vanya's, that he truly remembers where he is. 

He knows, in that soft way that people who've spent years of their lives together know things, that Vanya is a few seconds away, that she is a heavy sleeper and that she is certainly curled up in the bed that had once been Ben's, clutching Mr. Snuggles. He knows that he misses her, the way a child might miss their favorite worn blanket after being forced to sleep without it for days at a relative's house.

But he doesn't go to her.

Behind him are the soft rustling sounds of clothes being folded, packed into a suitcase. Behind him is Allison, standing bright and tall in a ray of glassy sunglow from the frosted windows.

There's never been a choice, between Vanya or Allison. He and Vanya have never lied to each other about who he'd pick, if he'd ever be blessed with a choice (which, as a Hargreeves child, he's never really had).

So, he goes to Allison's room, slipping in unannounced, as he always had back when they lived together.

She sees him coming, and with a heeled toe, quickly kicks the worn cardboard box full of clippings of articles featuring her, the ones Vanya had compiled and had dutifully kept up, deeper under her bed. Earlier this morning, she'd seen it, had dropped to the floor and picked through them all, and felt a warm, sharp-edged sort of glee at knowing that Luther (because who else could it have been, but Luther) had cared for her. That there might yet be a chance for them.

Luther nods at her in greeting, makes a quiet remark about how odd it is to be back, and she muses in agreement. 

He is still not quite sure what to do with himself, now that his father is dead and he is back on Earth. This is a constant. 

She is smarting from the loss of her daughter, determined to attend court-mandated therapy sessions that she sincerely wants to attend, so she might be allowed to see Claire again. This is a variable.

"I'd love for you to meet her," Allison says. She'd been staring at the locket hanging from her vanity for hours last night, thinking about the promise they'd made to each other; the promise she'd broken. Thinking about what had happened because of that betrayal.

What she'd chosen to ask him to do is something she decides upon in so many timelines, but in this particular one, she thinks of it days sooner. 

"I tell her about you," she says, "I'd tell her her uncle was living up there. That he was... protecting us from harm. I mean, you were her own personal superhero."

She watches Luther perk up just a bit like this. If he had a tail, it'd be wagging. There he is, there's the boy she loved, the boy she loves. 

_Come with me,_ she thinks. _Ask me to take you to meet her, and I will. Leave this sad old place and let's pretend you came with me all those years ago. It'll be just like it should have been._

"When you left, it seemed like all you wanted to do was forget this place ever existed," Luther says, as he does, nearly word-for-word, in the world where Vanya never comes home until the funeral.

Allison winces, feeling something inside her suddenly go cold and begin trembling. _Is this it, then,_ she wonders. _I left, and he became convinced that I was done with him. That I never wanted to see him again. That I've moved on._

When Allison had removed the locket from her neck and left it in the house, she'd done it not because her feelings had faded, but because she'd been determined to burn all her bridges as fast as she could.

She'd gone into the world convinced it'd be bright and kind and good, and had instead wandered out into the dark for years.

 _Such a mistake,_ she thinks. _I was such an idiot._

"This _place_ , yes. But not _you."_

_Come with me, come with me._

"I'd like that too, but..."

(In this universe, Luther does not care about his father's monocle. In this universe, Luther is shackled to the house by something else.)

"But," he says, "I can't leave Vanya here."

Allison _knows_ Luther. She knows him with the deep sort of sureness that comes from years of enduring long hours of training without pause, from licking their wounds together, from standing by his side and helping him snatch their reluctant, dysfunctional little team by the scruffs and forcing them to _survive._

She knows what this is.

And because she is Allison-- because she is his confidante, because this is what Allison and Luther _do,_ they plot and scheme together and she calls him on his bullshit when his judgement is shoddy, to save their family from careening into disaster, that is what she _does--_ she tells him without hesitation. She has to, you see. 

"Don't turn her into a mission."

His face freezes up, and she watches tension roll through his immense shoulders. In the moment before he puts on that blank, serious face he always wears like a mask during missions, she sees such naked _sadness_ that it makes her take a step back.

He leaves, and she watches him go, wishing she were brave enough to follow.

\----------

Vanya sleeps through her alarm, and into the early afternoon. She has a nasty habit of doing this, and it's lasted well into adulthood. She's never had to grow past it.

She rolls out of bed, as she usually does, and changes out of her Academy pajamas, the ones she's been wearing since she was thirteen, the ones that are full of holes, but softened by age and so comfortable that she can't bear to throw them out.

The previous night's events come over her slowly, like a dream might, and Vanya hisses, "Oh _shit,"_ under her breath.

Immediately, Vanya hurries up the stairs to find him, forgetting the rest of her morning ritual. Her hair isn't tied back, her shirt isn't buttoned up to the collar, her morning dose of her mystery medication is forgotten, and Grace is not in a good enough shape to remind her to come take it.

She finds him there, because now that their father is dead and miracles are in fact possible again. She finds him staring morosely out his window, at the rusted-over, structurally-unsound fire escape they'd used when they were twelve to slip out to get doughnuts a block away.

"Oh, thank _God,"_ Vanya breathes, mostly to herself.

_This is not a dream, he is right here in front of me. He is too young and too old and he is alive and right here and he came back._

In this universe, Five does not apologize softly for leaving her. That apology will come later, and it will be for a different sort of leaving, the original leaving he'd committed against her when they were thirteen, the one that had dealt the wound that tends to be what breaks the world in most of the timelines. That apology will be whispered on the evening of October 1st, 2024, when they finally close the distance that has opened up between them, and make good on a promise they made to themselves when they were children, and will make to each other in a manner of days.

In this universe, he does not speak to her as one might speak to a wounded doe. He does not quietly humor her concerns, that perhaps he is unwell, that perhaps he needs to rest, (In most universes, Vanya Hargreeves, as the beating heart of the family, has the right idea about what her siblings need, and this one is no exception). 

In this universe, that soft touch he'd witnessed last night had been playing on the insides of his eyelids all night long. He'd been so _angry_ then, and had nurtured and cared for his anger the way he might have cared for her once, if he hadn't listened to his hubris.

In this universe, when Vanya admits her dismissiveness, Five huffs, shaking his head, and turning away. There are a lot of things he wants to say, to scream, and if he were not as old he is, he'd not have the patience to prevent them from spilling out.

But he isn't, despite what his appearance may have you think. Five Hargreeves is old, and he's tired, and he wants to come home, but the world is ending so soon and he can feel it slipping through his fingers, the way she has. 

"You _know,"_ Vanya says, and there it is, there's that sharp bite in her voice that he's missed, and it sends a chill down his spine; he's broken out of the fog and sees the beacon in the distance, and he will make it to shore--

"I wasn't the one who fucking left," she concludes with a hiss. "You're mad. I get that. Well, so am I."

He's never been on the receiving end of one of her barbs before, and it finds its way under his armor, right to his scarred, stiff, heart, and pierces through to the sluggish blood still pulsing at its core.

In many universes, Five chases after her when she leaves. In a few, in the kinder ones where the world is stopped from ending far earlier, he catches her, takes her wrist into his hand, and urges her to help him with his latest plot, the way he once would when they were young. In most, Klaus is crouched in the wardrobe, positioned by the universe to intercept them.

(In this universe, Five doesn't wander for hours, a wagon trailing behind him, searching for the bodies of his family, before stumbling upon them among the crushed columns of the Icarus Theater. He finds them immediately, buried in the bowels of the house, Diego and Klaus and Allison and Luther and a scorched, blackened corpse that he won't ever realize had been Vanya.)

(In this universe, Five does not find a glass eye, streaked with still-wet blood, clutched in Luther's fingers.)

(In this universe, Five hasn't a clue as to who or what causes the apocalypse.)

(In this universe, it comes in three days, and he has but two left.)

In this universe, he stands in the doorway, and stares at Vanya, at the lines etched into her forehead and around her mouth, at the way her eyes darken and her fists clench at her sides. 

_You did this,_ she's saying, without saying anything at all. _You did this to me, you did this to him, you did this to us. You don't get to fucking blame me for it._

He wants to say, _I know. It's our fault, mine and hers, I know. We left you here, we left you to each other, and we never should have gone, we should have fought harder to take you with us._

Instead, he watches her turn, and stride out, listens to her feet smack against the stairs, swallowing a thick, phlegmy ball of bitterness that's caught in his throat. He watches her go, wishing he were a kinder man, that he were kind enough to follow, that he'd been kind enough to stay.

\----------

Leonard Peabody hovers outside the house for days, paging through his copy of _Extra Ordinary._

In many universes, Vanya is within his reach. In this one, she is too withdrawn into the bowels of the house, and should she have ever emerged, too mistrustful to anyone outside the family to be open to his affections. 

In this universe, he gives up. The likelihood of his being able to sway any of the other surviving members of the Umbrella Academy are too infinitesimally low. So, he goes back to his woodworking shop, and maintains the life he'd built for himself. He never kills Helen Cho, he never loses an eye, he's never responsible for the deaths of three blue-collar men in Jackpine Cove, he causes no apocalypses at all.

In this universe, he attends to his business, continues to contribute to yearly charity auctions for at-risk children, and he eventually takes down his desecrated anti-fandom shrine, and throws his Umbrella Academy memorabilia away, save for a single handmade costume, the one he'd been arrested in when he was thirteen, which he keeps hanging in his closet beside the tuxedo he wore to his grandmother's funeral. He lives a long, quiet life, which suits him just fine. He never meets Vanya Hargreeves and everyone in the world is better off for it.

(In this universe, in the year 1955, Dot throws her file at the wall in frustration and shrieks _"FUCK!"_ at the top of her lungs. She's definitely not getting Employee of the Month.)

\----------

Allison picks at the fading paint in the payphone keys, listening to Patrick's voice, distorted over the poor quality of the house line, laying into her about skipping yet another therapy session. He's never said so much to her in one sitting, in no small part because she never let him. Now, emboldened by the limits of her power, which, despite her father's best efforts, is only effective in person, he's eviscerating her.

And in this case, well, he's being a little irrational, after all her father _did_ die.

But then again, he knows how little she cared for him. He knows that going to his funeral wasn't exactly high on her to-do list. He and anyone in Los Angeles who pays attention to the celebrity gossip circuit knows that when the news broke at the _Love On Loan 3_ afterparty red carpet that her father had died, she continued into the party, and danced the night away. She hadn't exactly been subtle. 

He doesn't know about Luther.

She lets him lay into her longer, wishes sorely that she could go back and stop herself from ever leaning into his ear after their tepid first date and whispering _**I heard a rumor that you love me,** _wishes she'd been a kinder person who understood how to love people without abandoning them.

She wishes a lot of things, but she doesn't want to think too hard about them, because if she does, she'll ruin her makeup. So she weakly protests her ex-husband as he postpones her meeting with her daughter, and mercifully, he hangs up on her.

She sighs. She'd cancelled her flight again; Five is back, and she needs another day to help him figure himself out, whether he wants her or not, before she buries her dignity and returns to Los Angeles to pretend as though the loss of custody hadn't been something she freely allowed. She, with her power to make anyone think or do anything, didn't _lose_ her daughter; she _let her go,_ so she might become worthy of her.

"I've never met your ex-husband," comes a quiet voice, husky from disuse, "But he sounds like an asshole."

Somewhere near the end of her conversation, Vanya has materialized at the end of the hallway, peering out of Ben's room. She's still in black, Allison notes sourly, raking a critical eye over her loose dark ensemble, and its similarities in silhouette and color to the hideous rubbery monstrosity she'd been forced to wear as a teenager. _Even though the uniforms aren't being enforced anymore, she's still trying to dress like the rest of us. How cute._

And then, that especially nasty part of Allison's mind, the one her father had cultivated lovingly in lieu of nurturing things like conflict resolution skills or a basic understanding of the concept of consent, the one she's trying to starve out, breaks loose for just a second and crows: _Do you wear my old uniform when Luther fucks you?_

She swallows it quickly, strong enough to catch the worst of her words before they fly out of her mouth, some of the time.

Allison draws a quick hissing breath in through her nose, shocked at the viciousness of it, the irrationality of it, and watches Vanya recoil at her.

Luther is _Luther,_ for God's sake. And Vanya is _Vanya._ They don't sleep in the same room for a reason.

"You know, you're probably better off here." 

"Rich words from the girl who never left." And here she goes. Here's why she needs to earn Claire back.

Vanya flinches. "I _did."_

"Didn't stick." Allison flips her hair over her shoulder, "You know, Vanya, if I wanted advice, it wouldn't be from _you._ You don't have a child. You don't have a _real_ life." _You don't have a real relationship._

Vanya doesn't defend herself. She just stands there and takes it, the way she always does. 

"You wouldn't understand," Allison says, choking on her own bitterness, on her anger that Vanya had Luther for years and years, and still does not love him the way he ought to be loved, on her guilt, that she left them alone and drove them to each other, "You don't know what it's like to love someone like this. Like when you're apart from them, you can't breathe. Like you feel like you would _die,_ and I mean actually..."

Vanya's staring up at the staircase, her face pink and blotchy.

And Allison gets it: Oh, she _does,_ doesn't she?

(In this universe, Allison stalks away from her sister with her tail between her legs. She waits for hours for Five to return, but he never does, so she retires to the attic, to smoke and stare at the moon and hate herself as the sound of Vanya's violin wafts up from floors below.)

(In this universe, Pogo still urges her on the path of her father's death, but she gives up on the camera room long before she stumbles upon the planted tape featuring Reginald's last moments. One tape, in which Vanya is alone, always alone, while she and Luther are playing footsie in the basement, is enough to send her fist driving through the screen.)

\----------

In Vanya's years alone in the house, she'd picked up a variety of concerning habits, the side effect of being alone for too long, of being surrounded by people determined to stunt her development into an independent, functioning person: forgetting to wash herself for days at a time, sleeping and waking at odd hours, lying spread-eagle on the polished floor in the middle of a seldom-traversed hallway and staring at the ceiling for hours on end, drinking her father's ever-replenishing liquor cabinet dry in front of her brother's portrait.

These habits extended to her medication, for a while: She would often take two or three or even four tablets in one go, to plunge herself deeper into that arctic numbness that so often overcomes her. Maybe if she sunk down far enough, the logic went, she'd fall through the center, and come out the other side. 

(This logic, at least in this universe, was responsible for Ben's death. Not that Vanya knows this, of course. None but he and Klaus know that he'd never intended to leave.)

This was a poor idea, she now knows: A few weeks after Luther had left for the moon, she'd taken too many on impulse, promptly forgotten, and downed half a decanter of whiskey. Not because she'd intended anything, but because it was there, and she had nothing better to do. 

The next morning, Mom had found her, blue-lipped and gray-faced and weak-pulsed, and she'd lost the privilege of taking her medicine herself after that. 

This is why Vanya never takes her medication today. Or tonight.

She goes to the infirmary for it, where Mom is tasked with serving it to her, and watching her take it. She does this tonight, as she does every night.

But her robotic mother hasn't been doing well for days now. Her programming's sudden rewrite, while intended to ensure Reginald's death, also extended to Vanya's medication, by virtue of it scrambling her medical protocols.

The effect: Mom hasn't ordered a refill on Vanya's medication to be delivered to the mansion, and she'd run out a day ago.

Vanya forgets entirely about how she's skipping an entire day's worth of pills when she sees her mother has lost power already, and must drag her back to her station for a recharge, after which time, Vanya sits quietly with Luther in the rooftop garden.

There, they sit, with the weight of Allison and Five and all they represent between them, his hand in hers. Luther stares over at the greenhouse he had been forbidden from entering, and contemplates, seriously, walking over to see what's left of his first and only date.

"It's over," she says, "Isn't it?" 

He doesn't answer her.

There's only the slow, final untangling of their fingers as their hands fall away. Neither can say who starts to pull away first, only that they are both letting go, and that because it is mutual, that because they understand each other so deeply now to know that it is mutual, it is okay.

Vanya reclines, pressing her back into the brick of the flat roof, and tries to think of nothing at all. The wind picks up and shakes the windows with an urgent, warning rattle. 

(In this universe, as in all universes where Vanya has powers, they inevitably begin to stir.)


	5. Chapter 5

Vanya sleeps restlessly for the first time in decades, tossing and turning and waking in the deep blue hour just before the sun rises, sweat coating her back, her gut churning and her skin shivering. She claws out of the mountain of blankets she ordinarily uses to weigh herself down, rips off her old pajamas and digs through her clothes for the softest pair of sweats that she can get her hands on, determined to have something touching her skin that won't itch incessantly.

She feels awake in a way that she hasn't for a while, like someone's changed her batteries or given her an electric shock, and her heart's thumping like the foot of a terrified rabbit in her chest, and no matter how many long, deep breaths she takes, it won't settle.

She showers, and cranks up the heat, as she's used to doing, but when she steps in, she leaps back with a yelp, suddenly unable to bear the heat.

Vanya wanders out into the dimly lit courtyard, dropping out in the damp leaf litter, and digging her fingers into the half-dead grass. The damp chill of the earth seeps in through the seat of her pants, and her hair hangs in wet ropes around her neck and shoulders. She drums her feet anxiously against the dirt, thinking quite suddenly that she wants to shear it all off, to get rid of the constant weight knotted at the back of her neck. 

Her thoughts are rolling away from her, faster and faster, buzzing like a hive full of bees has taken up residence in her brain, like the crickets and night insects chattering around her in the last moments before dawn breaks have taken up residence inside her somehow, and are scattering her thoughts to the wind, which creaks and moans high above her.

Vanya brings a clammy palm up to her forehead, and groans. It feels like a fog's suddenly been lifted from her mind, and now the sun's scouring down on it.

She needs to eat something, she guesses, and leaps to her feet, surprised by her own sudden energy. Vanya smears her palms on her jeans, and is headed off to find Mom. 

Vanya walks into the basement kitchen, where Mom is puttering away at breakfast for five of her children, cracking eggs and frying bacon and pouring glasses of orange juice, and... _no,_ Vanya realizes. That's what she _should_ be doing.

What she _is_ doing, is repeating the same inane phrase, _Oh, goodness me, I'm afraid I don't remember-remember-remem-mem-mem-mem,_ over and over again as she slaps a spatula over a blackened, smoking husk that might've been an egg a few minutes ago, but is now a fire hazard.

Vanya rushes over, to pull Grace away and switch off the stove, but she's resistant, as if she were a mannequin rooted to the space in which she's standing. 

The house is saved from a horrific fiery fate, and Vanya's worries about Grace have only been intensified by this sight, so she hurries off to find Luther.

She finds him in the mezzanine with Allison, and immediately ducks down below the banister at the sight of the two of them, leaning in towards each other, heads bowed in quiet, hushed conversation. 

Somehow, Vanya can hear every word.

"I should have gone with you, you know," he murmurs. "I... I've wasted so much of my life, but..."

(In this universe, Luther has known for years that Vanya had been the only one to read and sort through his missives and reports. In this universe, he's had years to absorb the news that his father could care less about what he's doing on the moon, that he could care less about sending him enough food to get by on. In this universe, the leash tying him to his father is far more frayed, and he could feel its undoing coming for a long while.)

"Please, let's not think about all of the might-have-beens or the what-ifs. You can't let them haunt you forever. I mean, we can't go back." There's something wounded in the tone of her voice, that tells Vanya that Allison wants nothing in the world more than to do just that.

Allison leans forward, and her smooth dark hands slide gently around Luther's gloved one. His fingers twitch, and Vanya knows he's longing to entwine them with hers.

"I'm looking at tickets for a flight tonight. You can be on it with me, if you like."

Around her neck glints a glimmer of gold, and Vanya knows exactly what it is, knows exactly what Allison intended when she put it on this morning.

The thing that urges Vanya to step forward isn't jealousy (let's not kid ourselves), it's fear. Not of losing him, of being left alone.

If he leaves, if he gets on that shining Perseus Flight and jets off to the land of sandy beaches and palm trees and film stars, she will be left alone in the dark halls of the house. Diego's already left the house, and Klaus won't be far behind. Five's back, but he's different in a way she cannot grasp, in a way she is certain will bar her from understanding forever, and he left yesterday and might not come back at all.

Luther's it.

So she springs up, and the words fly from her mouth, booming down the hall, louder than she'd intended them: "Something's wrong with Mom."

Allison and Luther leap apart, the way they had when Vanya'd walked in on them trying to kiss all those years ago, the way all of them look when they're caught showing the affection their father had tried and failed to stamp from them entirely.

She won't be able to keep them apart for long, but for a few hours, he'll still be _here._

"W...what do you mean?" Luther says, face turning pink as he casts a guilty glance over to Allison, who's folded her arms over her chest and is staring at Vanya coldly.

"Mom's... I don't know how to describe it. You need to see her. I think you might be right."

The blood drains from Luther's face, and he moves into place behind Vanya, Allison a step behind them.

(In this universe, Grace's fate still falls into question on the third day of the Hargreeves family's reunion. This time, the question of Grace's capability isn't raised by the suspicion that she poisoned their father. It's raised by the simple observation of her behavior itself.)

\----------

It's decided quickly: there must be a meeting, to determine what's to be done with their mother.

There's an argument, of course. In this universe, Luther still thinks of Mom as a machine first and foremost; he's seen too many strange things throughout his childhood, had too many trips into the uncanny valley with Grace to ever regard her as anything more than a programmable thing, a security camera and a microphone that walked and talked and pretended it wasn't what it was. A wire mother coated with fur is still a wire mother, and is only a substitute for the real thing for a child who has never known the difference.

Allison, who has long associated love with action over feeling, who is smarting from the loss of her daughter and feels a horrific stab of guilt at the realization that Luther isn't the only one who'd suffered so greatly after her leaving, chooses to think of her as their mother, above all.

And Vanya remains silent through it all, quietly ruminating, playing with the hem of her untucked shirt. She's been in the house longer than even Luther, has watched Mom spark and sputter and rust over the years, and knows better than anyone that she is a machine. 

But that doesn't change the ache that grabs her heart and squeezes it at the thought that the answer is to shut her down.

Mom is a robot; this is something Vanya has never contested, something she's always known, reaching all the way back into the fuzziest memories of her childhood. The love she offers is false, a program written by their father, an extension of his will.

But Vanya is Vanya, and false love, the kind that's been typed into a computer terminal and expressed through code, the type that's designed with the directive of ensuring the loyalty of children who have no other option but to cling to it and pretend it is true, is exactly the sort of love she's long conditioned herself to accept; it's better than nothing. So she takes it, and takes it, and takes it. 

And so she ultimately raises her voice, and admits her support of Allison.

Allison stares down at her in surprise, and Luther simply shakes his head, before hurrying off to find their brothers so they might bring it to a vote.

They're alone soon enough, left to defrost after yesterday's mess.

Silence hangs between them like the Sword of Damocles, and Allison taps her heel nervously against the floor, winding her locket chain around a manicured finger.

Vanya folds her arms tightly around her middle, slouching on the antique couch she'd kissed Luther on nearly a decade ago. Her ears burn as she remembers it, glancing over at her sister, which Allison takes as an invitation for conversation. 

"I shouldn't have said those things to you yesterday," Allison says, quite suddenly, and Vanya blinks. "I... I misread a lot of things."

_I'm trying to get onto a plane with Luther, and it's terrible and selfish of me, but I'm not going to stop asking. And I know that when it comes to it, you're going to let him come with me. And you know it too._

(Let the record show that Vanya does. That she is thinking, now, of Five's return, and wondering if it means she might not have to suffer loneliness for long.)

"And I'm realizing that I'm not good at this whole... _sister_ thing." Allison's always been shit at apologies. She's never had to learn how to give them.

"Hadn't noticed."

"Oh? Tell me how you really feel."

Vanya giggles, high and sudden and strange, and Allison is shocked. She's never heard her do _that,_ before.

"Maybe I will," Vanya snarks, and it's so sudden, so unexpected that Allison coughs out a laugh. 

And then she does.

(Above them, the metaphorical sword sheathes itself. The apocalypse, for what it's worth, calls itself off quietly, and goes unnoticed.)

\----------

In this universe, there is no fool's errand, staking out Meritech Laboratories for days on end. In this universe, Five, adrift and deeply confused and buckling under the burden of the world's fate, spends the afternoon of his second day back in civilization traveling to the Gimbel Brothers Department Store. He gathers his apocalypse-era companion from where he'd found her forty-five years ago, buried in the rubble of the store with a long auburn wig and sleekly-cut bangs. 

It's awful, Five knows, to be falling back into the arms of an old flame, but he allows himself the weakness. The world's ending, and he can't save it yet, and Vanya's with _Luther,_ and everything's a damn mess. None can blame him for falling into old patterns, for falling into old vices and old comforts.

In this universe, Five steals Delores in broad daylight, in front of a worker who's too underpaid to care much about the eccentricities of a seemingly-school-age boy, desecrating a mannequin display to tear the upper torso of one in particular off of her lower half (He doesn't need the lower half, he knows from experience, and out of respect for the rating, the narrator will go no further as to what he will be doing with said mannequin on this fine night).

The hitmen hunting him miss him by a broad margin. They stake out the store all night long, and do not come across him at all. 

In this universe, Five spends his second night back drinking himself into a stupor in the deepest reaches of the Argyle Branch of the City Public Library, reacquainting himself with the cold plastic touch of his old addiction. He has two days to save everything, and he has no idea where to start, and everything in the world is wrong.

He has no idea how to stop the end of the world, no idea how things have changed so much, no idea about anything at all. So he goes to the home he'd kept up for well over a decade in the apocalypse, where he'd found Vanya's book of lies, when he'd been the only man alive and everything'd made so much more sense. 

There, he settles in among the upper levels, scrawling on the walls, looking for a way back to 2002 again, back to when they were thirteen and things made more sense. 

There, he uncaps the industrial-sized bottle of vodka he'd nicked from a nearby liquor store, and drinks. And drinks. And drinks.

And blacks out.

(Oh, he can hear Delores now, going on and on about how drinking makes him surly. He should've just left her at Gimbel's. He should've done a lot of things.)

This is where Luther and Klaus and Diego (and Ben) find him when they seek him out the next morning, curled up among bottles that to Klaus's dismay are empty, a pile of books on physics he's utterly destroyed with pen scratchings in the margins, and the copy of _Extra Ordinary_ that his younger future self will stumble across in a month's time, laying open across his chest.

Klaus bursts into laughter at the sight of their older-younger brother, flopping like a fish over the floor, clinging to his mannequin partner and muttering to himself about briefcases, about second chances. 

"Think he wants to go on vacation?" he says to Ben, who shrugs. Beside him, Luther and Diego glance at each other, and silently decide to check Klaus's pockets for hallucinogens when they leave.

Luther offers a half-hearted apology to a deeply distressed librarian and promising to pay for the mess their brother'd left, then takes his brother into his arms.

Klaus attempts to take Delores from him, cracking a joke about how he'd love to dance with Five's new lady friend, and Five snarls viciously enough to make even Klaus, who routinely plays chicken with death, to relent. 

As they walk, Diego and Klaus quickly pull ahead of Luther, weighed down by the weight of Five in his arms, and a distance opens up between them. Luther's content to leave it that way, as he crushes himself into the backseat of Diego's beloved car without them; Klaus has wandered off, and Diego, grumbling, went off to prevent him from falling into a manhole or whatever he's off doing.

Luther gently arranges Five in the seat beside him, and Five, loose from drink, all the strong walls he'd built over decades in a world of ash turned as stable as wet tissue paper, starts chuckling blackly.

"It's fuckin' ridiculous," Five rambles, "I'm going through puberty all over again. That ought to be the worst of my fucking concerns. But no! On top of all that, I'm the four fucking horsemen! I'm here to _save_ you all."

"...From what, Five?"

Five curses. He'd told Vanya, and no one else. Damn him. The world's in such unsafe hands. He holds his in front of his face, watching them blur.

"The apocalypse."

"What?"

"The world _ends_ tomorrow, Luther. And _God,_ you're too young to know about all a'this. All of you are."

Luther shakes his head. Idiot doesn't believe him.

"You know what your problem is, Five? You think you're better than us. You _always_ have, even when we were kids, and you--"

Five scoffs. "I don't _think_ I'm better than you. I _am_ better than you."

Luther rolls his eyes, and Five snaps, "In _all_ respects."

The tension's drawn taut between them like a bungee cord, like a mountaineering rope Herr Karlson used to prattle on and on about at the dinner table. They both know what he's talking about.

Luther seems to consider saying something, and smartly decides against it.

Five snorts, running a hand over Delores's painted face. He's still clinging to her, and he _hates_ himself for it. He wants to carve into his chest, peel out his shrunken, stiff, half-dead heart, roll down the window and hurl it out onto the asphalt. It's never done him any good, Handler always said it was going to weigh him down like an anchor, and she isn't wrong.

But he can't get rid of it. He _can't,_ you see. There's a chance he could revive it someday. When the world's saved, and the dust settles, he's going to need it for the life he'll have afterwards.

"Hey. Y'need to keep this quiet, alright?" Five gestures floppily towards Delores, "I'm not s'posed to see Delores anymore. I left her, you see? An' I... I'm not..."

Luther glances around, clueless, before resting his eyes on Delores. "... Her?"

"Yeah, her."

The rusty little wheels in Luther's head seem to turn. "Alright. Uh. I won't say anything."

"Good... That's... that's good." He can't risk it, you see. Vanya might not forgive him, if she knew he'd been seeing someone else while he was gone. "We were together for thirty years, you know." Longer, actually, but he's slurring, all the facts are smearing together in his head.

"You and... Delores?"

"Yeah." Five tilts his head, peers up at him, "How long's it been with you and her?"

Luther flinches, and Five's mouth quirks. Clearly, he knows about them, or what they would have been.

"Oh come on now," Five drawls, "You must've known."

"I don't think any of us did, not until you were already gone."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, Vanya would... She'd leave out those sandwiches for you every night. The ones you like, with the marshmallows. She's still doing it. Up until yesterday, anyway. You made that one yourself."

Something warm's stirring in Five's chest. For a second, it feels like someone's thrown open a window on a particularly dull day at the mansion and the damp, earthy air of spring after a rainstorm is rushing in; for a _second,_ he feels _young,_ truly _young_ again.

"So I could still... there's still..." _a chance, there's still a chance, there's still..._

"Five?"

"What?"

"I want you to know," Luther pauses, staring intently at the back of the seat in front of him. His face turns an interesting shade of pink. "That I... That Vanya and I..."

"That you took something from me? Something that I didn't even have the time to _realize_ I had?"

"Oh, Five," Luther sighs, "We're not..."

"Not what?"

Luther, who has never been good at understanding his emotions, let alone voicing them, opens and closes his mouth alone several times, before finally: "She shouldn't be alone. It wouldn't have been fair, for her to be alone. The house is so _big,_ and so _quiet,_ and..."

He realizes what Luther'd been trying to say: They're not in love. There's still a chance.

"And... and it also isn't _fair,_ for us to continue like this. It was supposed to be temporary, it was about surviving, but the years kept coming and we just... Well, nothing changed. But now things are so different, and I'm realizing that... that it isn't necessary anymore."

Five thinks about his years on the smoldering cinder of the world, about the things he's had to do to return, about putting his all into survival, so much so that he's never considered the day _after_ the apocalypse.

"Now you want to _live."_

_Now, you want to be with Allison. You want to go with her when she flies back. You want to be with her always._

"I do." Luther hangs his head. "And... I can't leave Vanya. I can't leave her alone."

And slowly, that last piece of the puzzle clicks into place in Five's brain, and he gets it: "Luther, I'm not going to leave again."

"I don't know if I believe that, Five. I don't think she does. You need to tell her. You need to prove it."

Five doesn't respond, pressing his head into the leather upholstery, staring at the car's ceiling. _Let's live through the next day, and then we'll see._

"I'm glad it was you," Five finally says, reaching up to pat Luther's enormous shoulder, and he means it. Vanya is alive, and she has been cared for, and that counts for a lot to a man who's been alone and reliant on only himself for forty-five years. If something were to happen, if Five were to die in his quest to save the world, she'll be in good hands.

Then, to deflect from the sappiness of the moment, "If it'd been Diego I'd have _had_ to kill him."

"Of course," Luther nods. "Wow, he'd be unbearable, huh?"

Five starts to laugh, and then it turns to a cough. His stomach gurgles ominously, and he claps a hand over it. Maybe getting his thirteen-year-old body plastered wasn't the best move.

The door to the shotgun seat flies open, and Luther starts. Beside him, Five growls.

It's only Klaus, arms overflowing with cheap plastic-wrapped snacks that Diego's caught him stealing from a corner mart, and Diego comes flying into the drivers' side a second later.

"Long story?"

"Short, actually. Now Klaus, duck down, we're gonna have to outrun this cop."

"Oh for _fuck's_ sake."

\----------

In the parlor, Luther sighs.

"You've been home with her the longest, Vanya," he says, "You of _all_ people should understand that it's time."

"No," Vanya says, taking everyone aback with the boldness in her tone, "I don't think that. I think that she just needs some help, is all. Let Pogo and me take a look at her, I'm sure we can figure out what's wrong." 

"Vanya, if her hardware is degrading as much as you said it was, then she might pose a genuine threat to the rest of us."

"What do you mean _degrading?"_ challenges Diego.

"Vanya found Dad's monocle in Grace's pocket."

"And?" Diego shrugs.

 _"And,_ it means that Grace found Dad dead, and she didn't realize anything was wrong."

Luther looks to Vanya, who nods morosely. "Mom was, well, designed to be a caretaker, but also a protector. She was programmed to intervene if someone's life was in jeopardy."

"But she didn't. Not when Dad had his heart attack. See, Vanya? I'm telling you, she could end up hurting someone if she's allowed to go on like this."

"Luther," Vanya huffs, "For all you know she wasn't even _there._ And by the time she found him, there'd have been no point. The report said he died in the night--"

 _"--Vanya._ What I'm saying is, we need to mitigate any future harm she might--"

"--Oh? Wait!" drawls Diego, more than a little bit delighted by seeing Luther cowed by Seven of all people, "Is this your _first_ spat? Do you two need to take this upstairs?"

Allison hurls her empty glass at him, and it bounces off his thick skull with an ominous-sounding clunk, which Klaus cackles at.

"I'm with Luther," Allison says dejectedly. In this universe, as in most others, she has his back, even when she disagrees with him; it's an old habit, one borne from being Three, from knowing that Luther's word goes, that the plan's the plan, even if it doesn't feel right, and even if they're making the wrong choice, they won't be doing it alone.

And so begins the voting. It doesn't change much, in the end.

All those in favor of switching their mother off: Luther, Allison, Ben (not that his vote is counted, of course).

All those against: Vanya, Diego.

All those voting 'Who cares? Can I have some money? I swear, it's not for drugs.': Klaus.

(It must be noted that in this timeline, Klaus is not snapped at by Luther in a stolen plumbers' van for making an ass of himself during a serious conversation about the end of the world. It must be noted that Klaus, in that timeline, values an act of pettiness over his own opinion during a vote regarding whether the closest thing he has to a mother will live or die, and therefore it must be construed that he does not particularly care if Grace lives or dies.)

Said stance is deemed by Luther and Diego, in a rare moment of complete agreement, to be unacceptable, so Klaus throws up his hands and says, "Fine. Whatever Five chooses."

And Five is currently incapacitated; when they'd pulled up to the mansion, he'd promptly vomited all over the interior of Diego's car, passed out, and been dragged up to his room to sleep the booze out of his system. 

Therefore, according to Luther's ruling, the vote is postponed.

It will never be completed.

\----------

On his way up to the attic, Luther stops by Five's room, peering in to see if he's of sound enough mind to vote on the subject of their mother.

He isn't. Five's still dozing groggily, too weak to leap in space or time, slurping down a glass of water that Vanya's handed him. She's sitting in a chair she's drawn up to his bedside, watching him with a soft look on her face. Their heads are bent together, and she is murmuring something to him. He dips his head in agreement, nodding slowly.

Luther can't hear a word of what they're saying, but he can guess, based on the way their hands almost touch on the mattress, on the way Vanya's shoulders shake a bit with laughter, that a commitment is being made, an agreement drawn up in the secret words they're sharing. 

(He is correct. Out of respect for the pair, the details of their conversation will remain secret. Suffice to say, it is now Five's turn to wait, and at the conclusion of that waiting, they will finally be even.)

(Out of respect for the reader, the promise, in six words: Not now, not soon, but _someday.)_

The scene he's witnessing, he knows implicitly, is extremely delicate in nature, like open heart surgery. Yes, that is what it is; they've plucked their hearts out, and have laid them out in their laps or on the bedspread, and are examining them, how withered and sickly and scarred and splotched with patches of rigor mortis they are. They are determining which parts are still alive, and which might revive someday, if given enough tender care. (It's a miracle, you see: there's _so much_ that can be saved, and the only salve needed is time, of which they have more than anyone in the world)

And Luther is a kind man, a sweet man, but it's in the parameters of his power and the new limitations of his body, that he always seems to struggle to be gentle. If he were to step in, he knows, he might break that tender, newly-born bond forming between the two of them. A crucial valve or vein might snap.

So Luther watches them from the doorway for a moment, remembering Five's words, and deciding, in a leap of faith the likes of which he hasn't performed since he was a teenager, that he is going to hold him to them.

Vanya catches him, turning slowly to regard him out of the corner of her eye, and the two of them watch each other for a moment. Then, they turn away.

When Allison finds him in her attic, hanging half out the window and looking up at the moon, he knows exactly what he wants to tell her: _I'm getting on that plane with you, if you'll have me._

But first, Allison smiles warmly at him, the silvery-blue full moon's light washing over her and making her look as though she'd been carved of marble, and his heart is trembling.

"I wish I'd been there with you," she says, in almost a whisper.

"You were." 

Then comes the gunfire.

\----------

In this universe, Hazel and Cha-Cha still arrive at the house on the third day of Five Hargreeves' return. They miss him at Gimbel's, but they retrace his steps to the diner, ask the kindly waitress there about the boy, learn of the brand on his arm, and find the house in the city that's wears the umbrella insignia on its gates.

In this universe, Diego still finds them first, and they still spray bullets down the children's hall. 

In this universe, Klaus is still oblivious to it all, and Ben is banging his head against the door in frustration.

In this universe, Luther, Diego and Allison descend on the intruders in the parlor, leaping into action. After all, nothing in the world brings a group of people together faster than a common enemy. 

And in this universe, they still get their asses kicked, huddling together behind a wall as gunfire rains down on them from the mezzanine.

"Where's Klaus?" Diego screams to Luther over the rattle of gunfire.

"I think he left hours ago," Allison calls out. 

"And Five? If that little bastard hasn't slept off his goddamn hangover, I'll kill him myself!" 

"He's in bed upstairs!" Luther shouts, wincing at the ringing in his ears.

Cha-Cha tenses, and glances quickly to her companion, who nods. The two of them turn, and sprint back towards the hallway in which they'd first encountered Diego, hot on the tail of their target.

"What are they even _here_ for?" Diego snaps, rubbing his hands over his ears.

In this universe, Vanya does not descend the stairs in confusion, calling out in concern to her family. She stays planted at the doorway to Five's room, hovering nervously, knowing he's in no state to jump himself to safety and finding herself reluctant to leave him, even if she thinks there's nothing she can really do to protect him.

When the hitmen whirl around the corner, and come face-to-mask with her, and their guns let off a thunderous rattle, Vanya catches the sound on pure impulse, weaving it through with her own scream, and through the sheer force of her terror, she paints the hallway red.

\----------

In this universe, Hazel and Cha-Cha never leave the mansion alive.

They'll leave it in pieces in the days to come, pieces that will be scraped off the once-green-painted walls, and the checkerboard tile floor, and plucked out of Vanya's hair.

For now, they remain spattered on the walls and ceiling and floor, and all across Vanya's front.

When her family come thundering up the steps, knives out and ready for blood, they find it.

They also find Vanya, half-collapsed on the floor, hyperventilating with her hands clamped over her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the mess she's made.

When they first skid through the gory mess on the landing, dragging trails of tile behind their heels, as they crash, one into the next, and then into the wall, Five is glaring at them. Then, recognition flashes in his eyes, and he settles back into Vanya's side, winding his thin arms tightly around her and gently rocking her back and forth as she shudders.

"Well," he says, "Sure took you guys a minute, huh."

Slowly, the five of them process the carnage in front of them, and who must have caused it, and what it means.

"My God," Allison breathes. _"Vanya?"_

In this universe, Vanya's powers announce themselves with a fleshy _pop._

(In this universe, the apocalypse is prevented by mistake, by the Commission's own meddling. Dot's never getting that promotion.)

Klaus, who in this universe will never be kidnapped, will never land on his ass in the middle of the Vietnam War, will never love and lose Dave and will have to go about getting clean in some other way, pads soddily up the stairs in only his towel, having finally grasped that there's been a commotion.

"Hey guys, how's it-- _what the fuck?"_

\----------

Allison doesn't get on that plane for another three weeks. There's too much to do.

Too much blood to scrub off the banister, and out from under her nails.

Too many cops to rumor after she and Five were caught sneaking a mannequin back into a department store at three in the morning, which she really needs to ask him about.

Too many logistics to run regarding the practicality of moving the contents of her house in Calabasas to an apartment in the city, half an hour's walk from the mansion.

Too many questions to run by a newly-fixed, newly-independent Mom about how to calm a crying child without the liberal use of mind control.

Too many time-traveling hitmen who keep seeming to respawn every few days, and keep getting set on the trail of her dear brother, who is apparently an intertemporal war criminal, instead of an international one, like the rest of them are, (save Vanya, so far). Hell of a story that was.

Too many pointers to give Vanya about controlling the power they all assume she'd taken an unusually long time to manifest, that everyone is enthusiastic about helping her explore. Naturally, the mansion is a wreck in a week, and naturally, they begin using their immense inheritance to begin reconstruction. Klaus puts in a twisty slide.

Too much time, now that the world is saved, for them to do just about anything. The doors to forever have been flung open, and the sunlight is streaming in.

(In this universe, Pogo opts to pull Reginald's journal out from its place in the gilded box in his desk, and sets it on fire in the courtyard, shrewdly deciding that some secrets ought to be forgotten.)

When she does finally step into first class, she does so with Luther's fingers entwined with her own, and each and every one of her siblings is there to wave her goodbye at the airport (and on Five's part, to demand photographs of his niece).

\----------

(A short coda: Five, at the mental age of sixty-five, and the physical age of twenty, and the legal age of thirty-six, decides to write his will. Mostly, because he supposes that at the age of sixty-five, that is what people do, and because as the proud father of one bouncing Doberman Pinscher puppy named Mr. Pennycrumb, he has to set his affairs in order should some horrific event befall him.)

(As a joke, he bequeaths Vanya to Luther.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (+ 'mineshaft ii' by dessa)


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